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COEOUGHT DEPOSIT. 



Childhood is the basis of the future, and I believe 
in religious instruction for American children. The 
future of the nation cannot be trusted to the children 
unless their education includes their spiritual develop- 
ment. It is time, therefore, that we give our attention 
to the religious instruction of the children of America, 
not in the spirit of intolerance, nor to emphasize dis- 
tinctions or controversy between creeds or beliefs, but 
to extend religious teaching to all in such form that 
conscience is developed and duty to one's neighbor 
and to God is understood and fulfilled. 

Warren G. Harding, 

President of the United States. 



W&t Sbmgbon Beligious (Education tEexte 
Bairib <£. Botonep, (general Cbttor 

GEORGE HERBERT BETTS, Associate Editor 



The New Program of 
Religious Education 



BY 

GEORGE HERBERT BETTS 



e^t^ 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1921, by 

GEORGE HERBERT BETTS 

All Rights Reserved 



DEC 27 1921 

Printed in the United States of America 

©CU630952 



CONTENTS 

chapter page 

Foreword 9 

I. Changing Concepts 1 1 

What shall the church do to be saved? — Saving the 
body and saving the soul — No saved church in a lost 
world — Practical temper of the times: New standards of 
efficiency in social institutions — New demands upon 
the church — The church cannot escape evaluation — 
Tests to be applied to the church: Results which cannot 
be measured — The test of clear aims — The test of the 
influence exerted by the church — The test of right 
methods — A pressing question: The church facing the 
test — Issues at stake. 

II. Conflicting Currents 22 

Conflict of opinion usually not to be deplored — 
Conflict may block action — The conservative and the 
progressive — Religious education and evangelism — 
The viewpoint of religious education: Work upon 
childhood the most fruitful enterprise of the church — 
Conservation, with reclamation a last resort — Reli- 
gion can be taught — The demands of religious educa- 
tion — The evangelistic viewpoint: Fear that religious 
education will substitute training for divine influence 
— Conversion as the aim of church activity — Con- 
trasting the two points of view: Detailed parallel com- 
parison of respective claims — Conclusion. 

III. What Is Religious Education 33 

Difficulties arising out of failure to define education 
and religion — Changing concepts of education: Changes 
in meaning undergone by this term — Fading of the ^ 
disciplinary from the concept of education — The mod- * 
ern meaning of education — This concept applied to 

S 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

CHAPTER PAGE 

religious education — Changing concepts of religion: 
Religion becoming more of a dynamic function in life 
— New meanings attached to religious faith and be- 
lief — The increasingly social nature of religion — Re- 
ligion applying to the whole life — The meaning of 
religious education: What religious education does not 
seek to do — What it does seek to do — Not a panacea. 

IV. Religion Through Education 42 

/ The world-wide renaissance in education — Social 
* meaning of this renaissance — The principle applied to 
religious education — The testimony of personal expe- 
rience: This shows a large proportion of active Chris- 
tians have never known conscious separation from 
God — The meaning of conversion in religious expe- 
rience^ — Religious experience without reclamatory con- 
version — The testimony of psychology: The concepts of 
"original nature" and "original sin" — Original reli- 
gious status of the child — The bearing of this position 
on religious education — How to make religion a nor- 
mal part of growth and experience — The testimony of 
the [church itself: The church has made the Sunday 
school more an evangelistic than an educational 
agency — Yet the church has been most successful 
when it has stressed its teaching function — Churches 
of the present which use the educational method — 
Conclusions. 

V. Religion Through Evangelism 54 

Differences in the presuppositions of the evan- 
gelistic and the educational method — How the church 
came by the evangelistic method: The Protestant Church 
and its earlier problem—The reclamation of the spirit- 
ually dead through evangelistic agencies — This prin- 
ciple mistakenly applied to childhood — The evangelistic 
concept prior to the "discovery" of the child and of 
education — Appeal of the evangelistic method to the 
imagination — The educational method less sensational 
— The evangelistic the cheaper and easier way if it 
produced the same results — The evangelistic method has 
6 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

an important place: At best many will be missed by 
the educational method — Some will fail to respond — 
The church must therefore continue a strong program 
of reclamation — Results of the evangelistic program: 
Evangelism without education results in an untrained 
church constituency — The tendency of the reclaimed 
to "fall from grace" — The church should educate its 
converts not less than its children. 

VI. The Church's Neglect of Religious Education . . 63 

Has the Protestant Church taken religious education 
seriously — How the Sunday school came to the church: 
The Sunday school first forced upon the church — 
Robert Raikes and the English Sunday school — The 
introduction of the Sunday school into American 
churches — Religious education looked upon as inci- 
dental: Comparative stress upon religious education 
and other church enterprises — The church does not 
train its ministry for educational functions — The 
church neglects religious education in its budget — 
Religious education in church colleges: Church founded 
colleges predominate in the United States — These 
colleges to train leaders for the church — Yet religion 
has a small place in the college curriculum. 

VII. If the Church Should Adopt an Educational 

Program 73 

Changes required if the church would make religious 
education a primary enterprise — An educational lead- 
ership: The present leadership of the church not 
trained for educational functions — Preaching rather 
than teaching to dominate as a church ideal — A new 
emphasis in the training of its ministry: Most churches 
of the present served by one minister only — Religious 
education deserves a prominent place in the minis- 
ter's training — Theological schools most favorably 
situated in connection with universities — A ministry 
of education: A new professional field opening — The 
linistry of education subordinated to one in the 

7 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

CHAPTER PAGE 

church — Change of emphasis in church program: Stand- 
ards by which to estimate value placed on its enter- 
prises by the church — Where does the church rank 
religious education — Where should it rank it — A 
redistribution of the church's budget: How the church 
spends its money — What should the church devote to 
religious education — Apply educational standards to 
the church school: Present standards not educational 
— How to introduce educational standards — Points at 
which these standards will apply. 

VIII. The New Program 89 

A new program is developing — Directions which 
this new program will take — Making the Sunday 
school a children's church: The children's church a 
teaching church — Program of the children's church — 
Saving the leakage between the Sunday school and 
the church — The vacation church day school: Origin of 
the vacation school movement — Present lack of stand- 
ards — Principles which should apply — The week-day 
church school: The modern origin of the week-day 
church school — The Catholic and the Jewish stress 
upon week-day religious instruction — Early American 
public schools and the religious element in the curri- 
culum — The secularization of the public school — 
Principles which determine the amount of time to be 
given any subject — The religious factor suffers from 
lack of time — Religious instruction to be kept out of 
the public school — The teacher training school: Com- 
parison of public school and church school teaching 
force — Need of church school teachers for more active 
training — Practical plans — The home: Educational 
responsibilities assumed by the old-time home — 
Change in the attitude of the home — No program of 
religious education complete without the home doing 
its part — How the church can tring the home into 
the program. 

A Selected Bibliography 104 

Religious Education Posters 107 

8 



FOREWORD 

This little volume is an attempt to define the aims of 
religious education and show its place in the scheme of 
the church's activities. 

In every new movement there is a time of indifference 
followed by a period of misunderstanding, confusion of 
thought, working at cross purposes; then acceptance. On 
the matter of religious education the Protestant Church 
is just now passing over from the first of these stages to 
the second; indifference and complacency are giving way 
to interest and concern, yet the new program is far from 
practical realization or even full approval. Much conflict 
of opinion and uncertainty still exists. 

Some see in the movement for religious education the 
dawn of the millennium, others think it a valuable 
adjunct to the church's present program, while still others 
are frankly skeptical over the whole project. The new 
term "religious education" means very different things 
to different people who use it. To some it is an effective 
tool for evangelism; to others it is a means of escape 
from necessity for the evangelistic method. Not a few 
see in this movement a great new social and spiritual 
force; but many say it is another fad and will soon be 
heard no more. 

These and similar questions are discussed in the present 
volume from the point of view of one who frankly be- 
lieves in the possibilities of religious education when that 
term is rightly conceived. The changing concepts as to 
the function of the church are noted; the causes under- 
lying the conflicting currents of opinion concerning the 

9 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

place of religious education are analyzed; religious educa- 
tion is itself defined; the interrelations of the educational 
and the evangelistic method are set forth; an explanation 
is sought for the church's relative neglect of religious 
education; changes which would follow a full acceptance 
of religious education as a major enterprise are outlined; 
and a sketch is made of the program required to make 
religious education fulfill its purpose in the modern 
church. 

It should be understood that the positions taken, while 
presented with deep convictjion, are intended rather to 
open than to close the discussion. The writer believes 
that the topics considered are among the most vital and 
crucial confronting the Christian Church to-day. In his 
presentation he hopes to bring these problems anew to 
the studious attention of church leaders whatever their 
denomination, position, or authority, to the end that the 
church may effectively place the religious education of 
youth at the forefront of its enterprises. 



10 



CHAPTER I 

CHANGING CONCEPTS 

What shall the church do to be saved? This is not 
mere sensationalism. The startling question is gravely 
being asked by serious men to whom the life of the church 
means more than life itself. What! Bluntly ask such a 
question of an institution whose avowed business it is to 
save others? Throw it like a bludgeon at an organization 
that has outlived oppression and tyranny and to-day 
numbers its adherents in hundreds of millions? 

Let us get this straight. No intelligent person believes 
that the Christian Church is in the least danger of going 
out of existence as an institution. Its corporate life is 
entirely secure, for as long as civilized men maintain an 
organized society so long will they have an organized 
religion, that is, a church. The question goes much 
deeper than this. It turns on the kind of church we shall 
have. 

It will be remembered that in Jean Valjean's dream 
when he was fighting a great moral battle with himself 
one called out to him, "Jean Valjean, you are dead." 
"I am not dead, I am alive," he answered. "No, you are 
dead; you have killed your soul!" came back the reply. 

Not the body of the church, but its soul is in danger. 
What shall the church do to save its soul, its spiritual 
dynamic, its constructive influence for righteousness 
which alone gives it the right or the power to assume 
moral leadership among social institutions and to claim 
the respect of men? What shall the church do to save 
the self-respect which comes only from the consciousness 

ii 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

of the fulfillment of obligation and the realization of 
destiny? What part will it play in the reorganization of 
human values now going on? Will it be able to take the 
offensive in the struggle against selfishness, greed, and 
the many forms of iniquity that have gained sway, or 
will its fight be a defensive one, satisfied with victories 
already won and with ground already gained? Will the 
church aggressively face forward and outward ready to 
meet new times and conditions, or will it turn its gaze 
inward and backward in enervating contemplation of its 
glory and traditions? These are the questions that many 
earnest souls are to-day anxiously asking. 

Those who mocked said, "He saved others, himself he 
cannot save." Like its Founder, the church cannot save 
itself except through saving others. It is unthinkable that 
a church can save itself in a lost world. For a church 
exists only to serve, and when effective service ceases the 
church no longer lives; its soul is dead. Only as it goes 
out into the world of men and affairs, out where the tides 
of life are strong and where evil abounds, out where 
human need is greatest, and there sets a lamp to the feet 
that go astray and throws a light upon the pathway that 
leads to a sure goal can the church be saved. Nor perhaps 
does it greatly matter whether a church that would not 
be willing and able to do these things should be saved 
or not. 

PRACTICAL TEMPER OF THE TIMES 

In a new and peculiar sense the church is to-day on 
trial at the bar of social judgment in the Christian world. 
While it is no longer unjustly held responsible for not 
having prevented the war, it is rightly held to account 
for taking a leading part in the spiritual regeneration of 
a disorganized world. This is a large contract, and the 

12 



CHANGING CONCEPTS 

way in which it meets this challenge will go far to de- 
termine the place the church is to occupy among social 
and spiritual forces for the generations that lie imme- 
diately ahead. 

It will not do to answer the challenge in terms of past 
achievement. That the church has many glorious pages 
(along with some dark ones) in its history all who know 
its past will gladly agree. Nor will it serve to appeal to 
a loyalty founded on sentiment alone. For the temper of 
these times is preeminently practical. The lessons of the 
past half dozen years have taken deep hold on the social 
mind. We demand results. We seem determined to quit 
guessing or assuming all along the line and go to finding 
out — finding out whether results are commensurate with 
claims and costs in every social institution. 

The necessity for this attitude has been forcibly thrust 
upon us. For example, we recently found that twenty- 
five per cent of our young men were disqualified for 
effective military service because of physical disabilities; 
so we rightly go to our public-school system and our 
national, State, and municipal health authorities and ask 
them what is the matter and what they are going to do 
about it. We discover that we have eight or ten million 
illiterate Americans among our population; naturally, we 
inquire what is wrong with our boasted free, universal, 
compulsory education and what remedy it proposes. To 
our astonishment the war uncovers a considerable block 
of people living under the American flag and receiving 
the benefit of its protection who shamelessly refuse 
loyalty and allegiance to our country when the supreme 
test comes; and we at once demand why the agencies 
responsible for educating, Americanizing, and socializing 
our adopted citizens do not do their work. 

And this practical attitude, or scientific spirit, if you 

13 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

will call it that, extends to the functions of the church 
as well. We are bent on carrying out very literally the 
injunction to "prove all things." We are willing to 
"hold fast to that which is good/' but we want to be very 
sure that it will not turn to dust and ashes if we are to 
hold to it. Hence it is that standards which have been 
accepted for centuries are being ruthlessly examined, and 
methods which have been employed for generations are 
required to defend their position. Tradition is no longer 
held in supreme regard just as tradition, nor dogma 
because it is dogma. Nothing is secure that cannot prove 
its right to a place in the scheme of things as they are or 
as they ought to be. Measure, evaluate, test — these are 
the watchwords of the present-day spirit, and they will 
inevitably be applied to the church and its methods in 
common with other forms of social enterprise. 

TESTS TO BE APPLIED TO THE CHURCH 

In so far as the results of the church's enterprises and 
activities are measurable at all (many of them are not 
measurable), they should be measured by the same 
standards that would apply to other social institutions. 
The church can claim, and desires to claim, no exemp- 
tions because it is a church. Yet the church can be most 
fairly judged and most fruitfully criticized by its friends 
— those who believe in it and its mission. The best friend 
of the church, however, is not the one who accords it 
warm but indiscriminating praise, ignoring its weak- 
nesses and errors. In the end we gain little from the 
physician who, instead of correctly diagnosing our ail- 
ment, would lull us into a false sense of security and well- 
being when a disease has fastened itself upon us. One of 
the great needs of the church to-day is fearless, friendly, 
clear-headed constructive evaluation and criticism; not 

14 



CHANGING CONCEPTS 

for the purpose of finding fault but with a view to clearer 
definition of aims and more effective methods. 

What are the tests by which the church is to be judged 
as to its efficiency and promise — by which it is to judge 
itself? Probably we shall not all agree upon the details of 
these tests, but upon the broader principles involved there 
should be little room for controversy; and space will here 
permit the statement of only the most general principles. 

The church's aim. Has the church a clearly defined 
aim, certain definite and attainable ends set as the goal 
of its effort? Does it know exactly what it is trying to 
do, so that it may determine whether it is succeeding or 
failing in its enterprises? And are the goals sought 
sufficiently concrete and real, so that it may be surely 
known when they have been attained or missed? Does 
the church know the true function of a church in a social 
process such as that of the present, so it may judge 
whether this function is being fulfilled? 

It has been estimated that in the world war an average 
of one thousand shots were required to hit a man. And 
this in spite of the many marvelously refined range- 
finding devices and niceties of mechanism for aiming the 
guns. One is bewildered by the thought of how many 
shots would have been required to hit a man if there had 
been no definite aiming and no specific objectives! Has 
the church improved and efficient range-finding devices? 
Has it sufficiently well-defined objectives? Does it know 
what it is aiming at? 

No one will dare to be dogmatic in answering the ques- 
tion about the church's concept of its aim — unless he 
chances to belong to an infallible (!) church. Yet there 
are many evidences of confusion in thinking or of failure 
to think at all about the true aim and function of the 
church. 

15 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

To some the church is a glorious heritage handed down 
by saints and martyrs, a precious charge to be zealously 
guarded and defended and kept unspotted from contact 
with an unfriendly world. 

To others it is a means and a symbol of personal salva- 
tion, a convenient instrument for a preliminary separat- 
ing of the sheep from the goats, a secure fold in which the 
elect can rest and possess a foretaste of the bliss that 
awaits them in the world to come. 

To still others the church is a social refuge, a kind of 
club to which we go on Sundays and listen to a sermon, 
perhaps worship, and hear attractive music and see and 
be seen. 

Or it is so many buildings, more or less impressive, 
usually with spires, often with bells, with organs and 
altars and pulpits and pews, with doors always open on 
Sundays and commonly closed most of the rest of the 
week. But a church must be more than any or all of 
these things. 

To a promising and growing nucleus the church is a 
means and not an end; a cooperative association of those 
who believe in the way of living set forth by Jesus, both 
for themselves and the world at large; an instrument for 
the joining of our common effort in making practically 
effective in the social life of to-day the spirit and message 
of its Founder; a going concern, which must be keenly 
sensitive to each changing spiritual problem of its genera- 
tion, ready at a$y moment to adapt method and program 
to meet the needs of those it serves; a democracy of 
opportunity for spiritual growth, the development of 
character and the offering of unselfish service for the 
betterment of our generation. 

All these and various other concepts of the true nature 
and mission of the church exist in the minds of the mass 

16 



CHANGING CONCEPTS 

of its constituents. There is great need of a clear, con- 
vincing dominant note of enlightenment and conviction 
sounded by recognized leaders of the great rank and file 
on this important question of what the church really is 
and what it is for. 

The simple fact is that in spite of much zealous and 
violent suppression of error; in spite of many battles 
royal over conflicting theologies; in spite of subtly de- 
fended claims to the possession of inf allible truth concern- 
ing the church; in spite of recent centuries of freedom 
for laboratory experiment in the Christian religion; and 
(strangest of all anomalies!) in spite of the surpassingly 
simple and clear message of the gospel, the church seems 
still to be uncertain of its true aim and mission. Most of 
all is it uncertain as to the best methods for carrying out 
its aims. The inevitable result of this confusion is un- 
certainty, indifference, lack of confidence, energy working 
at cross-purposes, and consequent loss of power and 
failure of achievement. The church believes it is on the 
way but is not wholly sure whither it is going or the best 
way to take to reach its destination. 

The influence of the church. Is the program of the 
church succeeding? Does it attract to itself not only in- 
creasing numbers of people, but an increasing proportion 
of the population? Is the growth of the church satis- 
factory? Does its prestige increase? Is its voice accepted 
as a voice of authority when it speaks on moral and 
religious questions? Are its own constituents trained and 
intelligent, loyal to the church and informed as to its 
enterprises? Do they readily and efficiently participate 
in the program of the church's activities, freely rendering 
service through its agencies? 

Here again the answer must be relative, for there has 
been far from failure in most of these items. Yet the 

17 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

showing in some of them gives thoughtful friends of the 
church grave concern and suggests the necessity for 
careful consideration in order to save from actual dis- 
aster. 

For example, the church has unquestionably suffered 
a considerable loss of prestige in the last generation or 
two. It has lost both relatively and actually in esteem 
and authority. Nor will it do to ascribe this attitude of 
the public to a growing worldliness for which the church 
is not to be held accountable. There are many evidences 
that the disaffection is not against religion, but, rather, 
against the church as an instrument of religion. Further, 
if there has been an actual decline in responsiveness to 
religion, the church must be held responsible for this con- 
dition, for it is the business of the church so to meet its 
problem and adjust itself to human needs that wide- 
spread irreligion does not develop in its constituency. 

A natural result of loss of prestige on the part of the 
church is failure to attract membership. No complete 
and dependable statistics on church affiliations in the 
United States exist. The following figures are, however, 
probably approximately correct. 1 

Protestants in the United States 24,354,000 

Catholics, Jews and other non-Protestants. . 21,076,000 
Not members of any church 58,110,000 

Thus it is seen that fifty-six per cent of our population 
are not members of any church. The proportion is even 
more unfavorable than appears on the face, since many 
whose names are on church rolls are practically never 
found in church buildings. Perhaps even a worse feature 
is that there are some twenty-seven million children and 

1 From Inter-Church World Survey, p. 208. 

18 



CHANGING CONCEPTS 

youth (under twenty-five years of age) in the United 
States who are receiving no religious instruction and a:e 
practically without direct religious contacts. Probably 
three children and youth out of four under eighteen years 
of age are receiving no religious instruction. But the most 
discouraging factor of all is that this unfortunate condi- 
tion has been gradually growing worse instead of better. 
Just at present there are some signs of a slightly turning 
tide, but the change is not yet marked. 

As an inevitable corollary of this showing, there is a 
widespread and increasing ignorance of the Bible and the 
Christian religion among all classes of our people. And 
this spiritual illiteracy occurs at a time when general 
education and enlightenment are rapidly advancing. 

Even children and youth reared in church homes and, 
more astounding still, those whose names are on the roll 
of the Sunday school often show little knowledge of the 
Bible and of the fundamentals of the Christian religion. 
Of the church and its program, even of the particular 
church in which membership is held, little is known by 
the average church member. The church cannot build 
safely on the foundation of a constituency who do not 
go to church, and do not know their Bibles or the founda- 
tions of the Christian faith. 

Some will raise the cry of alarmist at this point and 
call attention to the fact that the church has had a long 
history, has withstood many attacks and much hardship 
and persecution, and is stronger to-day than ever before. 

As was said in the earlier part of this discussion none 
need be alarmed concerning the continued existence of 
the church as an institution. The question is not the 
saving of the body of the church but the salvation of its 
soul and of the world. The Christian Church has now 
had three centuries of absolute freedom in this country. 

19 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

Yet to-day we find it occupying but a comparatively 
small part of its rightful territory, its membership, if not 
relatively on the decrease, for the last two decades at 
least not making marked advance, its constituency not 
deeply interested in the written or the preached Word, 
its children growing up in varying degrees of ignorance 
of religious matters, its spiritual dynamic unable to stem 
the tide of moral laxness and lowered ethical standards 
now sweeping over the nation. 

Now, these facts call for explanation. There is failure, 
at least relative failure, somewhere. Is Jesus Christ a 
failure? Is the message and program that he gave un- 
equal to the task laid upon it in this century? Or 
is the church failing — failing through its program and its 
method to give the system set forth by Jesus a fair trial? 

The church should not rest until this question is 
satisfactorily answered and the challenge fairly met. 

WHAT SHALL THE CHURCH DO TO BE SAVED? 

What shall the church do to be saved? The most 
immediate and possibly the most important thing it can 
do is to welcome and accept wholeheartedly the challenge 
that comes to it in this modern demand for practical 
results. For whether with its consent or without it, this 
test will be applied, is even now being applied and judg- 
ment will be rendered. 

If the church is willing to face the issue squarely; if 
it recognizes that it will not serve to continue on the 
basis of its present efficiency; if it will earnestly go at 
the business of finding out its own weaknesses and seek- 
ing to remedy them; if it will concern itself with dis- 
covering how to fulfill its function in the rather unsatis- 
factory world of to-day instead of expending its energies 
in defending its traditions (though many of its traditions 

20 



CHANGING CONCEPTS 

will grow stronger with sharp testing) ; if in self-forgetful- 
ness it will seek to serve rather than to be served — then 
the church shall be saved and, saving itself, will save the 
spiritual values of civilization. But if the church is not 
wise enough or great enough to do these things, . . . 



21 



CHAPTER II 
CONFLICTING CURRENTS 

Conflict of opinion is not to be deplored in the 
church any more than in any other social organization; 
for truth oftenest emerges out of free discussion, and 
opposing policies or principles are best tested in com- 
petitive struggle against each other. Yet the contest is 
seldom an even one, for the presupposition is always in 
favor of that which is. Tradition gives an advantage 
to principles long accepted and to policies already in 
operation. The burden of proof is rightly upon those 
who would make a change. The conservative has only 
to "sit tight," the progressive must make his case. 
Especially is this true in the field of religion which, 
from its very nature, is and should be conservative. 

Perhaps the opening sentence should be modified to 
say that conflict of opinion and the waging of discussion 
are not to be deplored unless the conflict and the dis- 
cussion absorb interest and dissipate energies that 
should go into action. It is possible, even in the church, 
for opposing camps to be so busy confounding each 
other that the common enemy goes unscathed. It 
sometimes happens that lack of understanding and 
mutual suspicion of sections within an organization 
render impossible the team work required for success 
and so defeat the purpose of the enterprise. 

Such a situation of misunderstanding and strain exists 
in some degree in the Protestant Church to-day. Two 
sets of principles and policies are increasingly in con- 
flict. And until this conflict is settled and concert of 

22 



CONFLICTING CURRENTS 

effort and action rendered possible the work of the 
church cannot go forward successfully. 

THE VIEWPOINT OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

On the one hand we have a new group, the advocates 
of religious education. Right or wrong, they are the 
progressives of the church on this particular issue, for 
they counsel a radical change of method and a marked 
shifting of emphasis by the church in its program of 
activities. They have through their plans and enter- 
prises even given us, within the last decade, the new 
term in our religious vocabulary, "religious education." 
To them also we owe another term, the "church school." 

The promoters of religious education are not timid. 
They feel sure of their ground. They tell us that tlte 
primary obligation and opportunity of the church, standing 
out ahead of all other obligations and opportunities what- 
soever, is the religious education of its childhood and 
youth. True, they do not make religious education the 
only function of the church. They recognize the fact 
that the church must minister to many social interests 
and needs; the church must be an evangelist to reclaim 
the wayward, a philanthropist to help the needy, an 
educator to war against ignorance, a missionary to less 
favored peoples, a reformer setting up standards of 
righteousness. 

Yet the advocates of religious education insist that 
the religious nurture and training of childhood and 
youth is a greater and more fundamental thing than the 
reclaiming through evangelistic effort of adults, or than 
the promotion of philanthropic enterprises, or than the 
waging of social reforms. These believers in religious 
education do not advise that the church relax its efforts 
at reclamatory evangelism, that it lay aside its philan- 

23 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

thropic work, that it quit the field of social reform, or, 
indeed, that it lay down any other good work. But they 
do insist that first things shall come first, and they are 
very confident what the first things are. So they de- 
mand that the church adopt a new program with reli- 
gious education in capital letters at the head of the list 
of its enterprises, conceiving this as the foundation of 
all other church activities or programs. Contrary to the 
assertion that "the great need of the church is new 
zeal/' these leaders say that it needs first of all new 
method, and that out of this new zeal will come. 

Pursuant to this policy the religious educationalists 
undertake to apply the scientific principles of general 
education to the teaching of religion. They insist that 
religion can be taught just as other things can be taught. 
They tell us that the same powers of mind are used in 
unfolding the religious consciousness, apprehending re- 
ligious knowledge, developing religious emotions, and 
arriving at religious decisions that apply in other forms 
of experience; and that therefore the genetic psychology 
of religion must govern the treatment accorded the 
child in his religious life. 

On the practical side these advocates of religious edu- 
cation advise that more of the child's education time 
shall be given to education in religion. They ask public 
school authorities to surrender a portion of the school 
time for instruction in religion to be conducted under 
the auspices of the church. Where time cannot be had 
from this source they ask parents to send their children 
to religious classes before or after the public-school day, 
or on Saturdays. They invite children to attend the 
classes in religion, either taking a part of their public 
school time or a part of their play time for this extra 
work. 

24 



CONFLICTING CURRENTS 

Having planned for the children, these educators ad- 
dress the teachers of religion and officers in the church 
schools. They are asked to attend training schools, or 
to organize study classes, or to follow a prescribed 
course of professional reading in order that they may 
apply the scientific principles and methods of educa- 
tion to their teaching or supervision. 

Next they approach the churches themselves and ask 
them for a greatly increased budget to employ paid 
teachers of religion for week-day classes and directors 
of religious education and in order to buy new educa- 
tional equipment and build classrooms in which the 
teaching of religion may go on. They come to the 
church editors and publishers and ask for new curric- 
ulum materials. 

THE EVANGELISTIC VIEWPOINT 

On the other hand is another and at present a much 
larger group, the conservatives of the church, who are 
complacent over the present system, or who are indif- 
ferent to, mildly opposed to, or frankly skeptical about 
the whole movement for "religious education." Another 
fad, they say, which will have its little run and then die 
out as so many other fads have done before, while the 
grand old church goes on forever. Besides, they add, 
have we not the Sunday school with its millions of 
children, and its thousands of devoted teachers and 
officers who give themselves gladly to the religious 
training of children? And does not an astonishingly 
large proportion of our church membership come from 
the Sunday school? Religious education! What would 
you have? Are not our children now receiving the reli- 
gious instruction they require? 

Nor are many of the conservative group without sus- 

25 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

picion that there is grave danger that "religious educa- 
tion" will end by substituting education for religion. A 
representative of this group, addressing a Sunday- 
school convention, asserts, "The Sunday school trains 
the heart y while 'religious education' trains only the 
head. Now, religion is more a matter of the heart than 
the head. Therefore the safest thing is to support the 
good old-fashioned Sunday school and let 'religious 
education' alone." Another, this time one who holds 
one of the highest offices in the gift of the church says, 
"'Religious education' is all right in its way, but what 
we need is to get back to the good old-fashioned re- 
vivals and the good old-fashioned religion." Another 
conservative church official, addressing a group of young 
ministers, advises them, "Give less time to 'religious 
education' so called and more time to preaching the 
effects of sin." Still another traditionalist leader, 
speaking to an assembly of religious workers, advocates 
religious education, but concludes his address with the 
advice, "If a child can go but to the Sunday school or 
to the public preaching service on Sunday, by all odds 
take him to the latter." In other words, not teaching, 
after all, but preaching is what the child requires. 

What the child needs, says this group, is just what 
any person needs, to be "soundly converted." He 
needs to "accept Christ" and become a Christian. 
What we ought to desire for the church, they tell us, is 
not more "religious education" but more evangelism in 
order to bring men (and children!) to a sense of their 
sin, to repentance, to divine acceptance and to regenera- 
tion. Said one distinguished evangelist: "If I had a 
million dollars to spend for religion, I would use nine 
hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and 
ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents for evangel- 

26 



CONFLICTING CURRENTS 

ism; and then I might use the remaining one cent for 
religious education." 

True, the conservative group does not ignore religious 
education, as conducted in the typical Sunday school. 
Indeed, it is this group that has built the Sunday school 
up to its present status. But by religious education in 
this sense they do not mean just what the advocates of 
religious education mean. They look upon the Sunday 
school not primarily as educational but evangelistic in 
function. Its primary purpose from their point of view 
is to prepare the child for conversion and lead him to 
membership in the church. When these ends are ac- 
complished the great objective of the Sunday school 
has, as they conceive it, been accomplished. 

CONTRASTING THE TWO POINTS OF VIEW 

These deep and far-reaching differences of position 
and policy are partly, but only partly, removable by a 
fuller understanding, each of the position of the other. 
Though it is probable that the progressive, the religious 
educationist, understands the position of the conserva- 
tive, the traditionalist, better than the position of the 
former is understood by the latter. This is for the 
simple reason that present religious educational leaders 
have for the most part grown up under the older tra- 
ditions and have separated themselves from the tra- 
ditionalist policy from conviction, and hence know 
what that position is. 

The differences between the points of view of these 
two groups are chiefly the differences of two contrasting 
methods which may for our present purpose be called 
the educational method and the evangelistic method. A 
parallel comparison of the two methods will serve to 
bring out their respective characteristics. 

27 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 



The Educational Point of 
View 

i. The child is at the 
beginning right with God 
(the explicit statement of 
the Methodist Episcopal 
Church and the view ac- 
cepted by most evangelical 
Christians and certain 
others.) 

2. The aim of the reli- 
gious educational process 
is to lead to a gradual and 
continuous unfoldment of 
the spiritual nature of the 
child such as results from a 
perpetual acceptance of the 
Christian way from the 
beginning. This accept- 
ance is at first unconscious, 
being directed by nurture 
and instruction, and leads 
to the formation of reli- 
gious habits, interests, and 
ideals. 

3. The child whose reli- 
gious consciousness devel- 
ops normally will naturally 
and inevitably come to a 
time or to times of per- 
sonal acceptance of the 
Christian way (that is of 
Christ), thus adopting by 
conscious choice the rela- 
tionship and obligations 



The Evangelistic Point of 

View 

1. Whatever the status 
of the child at the be- 
ginning he, nevertheless, 
because of inherent sinful 
tendencies, requires recla- 
mation through conversion. 



2. The aim of the Sunday 
school is to prepare the 
child for the day when he 
will become "converted" 
and "accept Christ." In 
this connection and to this 
end he is to be instructed 
in the Bible and religion. 



3. When the person has 
once been "converted" the 
great work of saving grace 
is completed. The person 
concerned is now a "Chris- 
tian," is "saved," a mem- 
ber of the "fold." Growth 
from this on may be de- 
sirable, but, after all, the 
great thing has been ac- 



28 



CONFLICTING CURRENTS 



The Educational Point of The Evangelistic Point of 
View View 



into which he has grad- 
ually been led from earliest 
childhood. This personal 
commitment of the child- 
Christian is both natural 
and desirable. It should 
not, however, be called 
"conversion," in the sense 
of reclamation from spirit- 
ual indifference, hostility, 
or evil. 

4. Religious experience, 
like any other form of ex- 
perience, is a gradual 
growth, a process of evo- 
lution in the life. Hence 
spiritual growth obeys the 
same laws that govern in 
other phases of the life and 
in other forms of human 
experience. A full, rich 
religious consciousness and 
sense of personal accept- 
ance and spiritual well- 
being may therefore be at- 
tained by the normal 
growth process providing 
right nurture and guidance 
are provided. 

5. Accepting the position 
of the child's right status 
with God, but conscious of 
native tendencies in the 



complished, 
cataclysmic 
converted. 



m 
act 



the one 
of being 



4. The entering into reli- 
gious experience and right 
relationships with God is 
accomplished at the time 
of "conversion," the occa- 
sion usually being accom- 
panied by a feeling of 
emotional stress, a sense of 
guilt, repentance, submis- 
sion, and acceptance by 
Christ. 



5. While possibly accept- 
ing for purposes of theo- 
logical discussion the 
theory of the child's right 



29 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 



The Educational Point of 

View 

original nature which will, 
if unchecked, lead to evil, 
the religious educational 
process strives to keep the 
original bond with the Di- 
vine unbroken, so that 
reclamation will never be 
required. The program of 
the church is, therefore, to 
be, first of all, one of con- 
servation of childhood 
rather than reclamation of 
adults. 

6. It is freely admitted 
that the religious educa- 
tion program cannot be 
made to work one hundred 
per cent effectively. 
Through lack of human 
wisdom, through spiritual 
indifference in the home, 
through abnormalities in 
child nature and through 
failure to put the religious 
educational program into 
effect, the church will still 
require a well-planned and 
well-executed program of 
reclamatory evangelism. 
The importance and neces- 
sity of this salvaging pro- 
cess will naturally grow less 
as the religious educational 
program is more fully de- 



The Evangelistic Point of 
View 

status with God, there is, 
nevertheless, a tacit as- 
sumption in favor of "orig- 
inal sin" or a "depraved 
nature" which for all prac- 
tical purposes makes it 
necessary for the church 
to make its program largely 
one of reclamation. 



6. Religious education is 
welcomed provided it act 
as an aid to evangelism, 
but decidedly not if it seeks 
to render evangelism un- 
necessary. Evangelism is 
the primary enterprise of 
the church. 



30 



CONFLICTING CURRENTS 



The Evangelistic Point of 
View 



7. The preaching of the 
Word is the great mission 
of the church. The chil- 
dren should regularly at- 
tend the preaching service, 
though the preaching will 
be directed to adults. 



The Educational Point of 
View 

veloped. Evangelism is 
rightly the last resort of 
the church instead of its 
primary enterprise; a con- 
fession of failure or weak- 
ness at some point in the 
religious training of child- 
hood and youth. 

7. The most promising 
point of attack and the 
chief strategic opportunity 
of the church is with child- 
hood. The church should 
therefore make teaching in 
the classroom its primary 
function and chief method 
of gaining adherents and 
training them to Christian 
character and service. 



On the personal side the members of these two groups 
work in entire harmony and friendship, with sincere 
good will and the spirit of helpfulness. Both are moved 
equally to promote the cause of Christianity and the 
church. Each takes its positions from deep conviction 
(though not always equally reasoned or tested) of their 
validity and the ultimate success of the methods em- 
ployed. Each is actuated by praiseworthy motives and 
usually by commendable zeal. Still they differ quite 
radically, and at some points in such a way as to hamper 
the success of the great enterprise of the church. 

Who is right? How shall the radical differences be- 
tween these two points of view be reconciled? Shall the 

3i 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

church depend chiefly upon the evangelistic method 
and center its efforts on adults as it has done in the past, 
only putting more zeal into the world? Or shall it 
change its method, stressing first of all the making of 
Christians by the gradual processes of education, and 
employing the evangelistic method as a supplement in 
order to salvage that remnant who escape the educa- 
tional method or fail to respond to it? No more im- 
portant question than this now confronts the church. 
Its further consideration will occupy the remaining 
pages of this discussion. 



32 



CHAPTER in 

WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

No small part of the indifference or hostility to religious 
education comes from a failure fully to understand just 
what is meant by one or both of the terms "education" 
and "religion" as used by the religious educator. 

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF EDUCATION 

The word "education" does not mean what it formerly 
did. It is, of course, obvious that any word means just 
what those who use it put into it as meaning; the form 
of the word may remain the same but its content changes 
from age to age. 

There was a time when education meant only the 
ability of a slave or underling to read an occasional letter 
or legal form for his master; or to write at his dictation 
some brief communication of social or business nature. 
Education stood for so little in the thought of the times 
that the man of affairs would have none of it, leaving 
that to those he could command or hire. 

At a later time education was defined chiefly as the 
ability to read in the original tongue in which they were 
written certain great literary classics and to discourse 
learnedly about them; manifestly such education was for 
the few, and not for the many. Following the Lutheran 
Reformation education meant the power to read the 
Scriptures, each for himself, translated into his own 
native tongue. In John Locke's time, we are told, educa- 
tion meant the training to be an English gentleman 
that is, the preparation to spend graciously and gracefully 
what someone else had provided. 

33 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

For some two hundred years prior to the opening of 
the twentieth century education was conceived as the 
discipline of the mind, the training of the intellect, the 
sharpening of the wits, teaching to think, reason, dis- 
criminate. The particular kind of knowledge gained was 
not nearly so important as the exercise the mind obtained 
in the operation. So that the matter was difficult enough 
and sufficiently logical to afford a rigid intellectual 
gymnastic nothing further was required. 

In this "disciplinary" type of education the feeling 
and volitional side of life was neglected. The attitudes, 
the emotions, the appreciations, the interests were 
entirely secondary. Similarly, the instincts were over- 
looked, the tendency to expression was ignored, the 
motives leading to self -activity were left out of account; 
knowledge was "imparted" to a passive recipient. There 
was no thought of carrying instruction directly over into 
action, and so into habit and character. 

There are many earnest people, especially those ac- 
customed to the older regime, who still look upon educa- 
tion as an affair of the head only, the heart (that is, the 
motives) being left entirely out. To them education con- 
cerns itself solely with the intellect, storing it with 
knowledge and training it in the processes of thinking. 
Such persons say: "This may be all right for general 
education, but not for religion; for religion touches the 
heart even more than the head; it is a matter of affection, 
love, loyalty, devotion, allegiance, righteousness, the 
indwelling of the divine spirit in the human heart. And 
such fruits as these cannot come by any mere training 
of the mind. It is the soul we seek to save in religion." 

Precisely. And that is what education undertakes to 
do in the modern sense of education. Education deals, 
as we understand the term now, not with any one depart- 

34 



WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

ment of life, but with the whole of it. It trains the 
intellect not more than the affections, the appreciations, 
the loyalties, the devotions, the aspirations. It reaches 
down to the springs of action, influences conduct, forms 
character, guides achievement, shapes destiny. Educa- 
tion trains the heart as much as the head, it reaches to the 
will, helping form its decisions, and provides motives for 
self-direction. It appeals to the conscience, stimulates 
self-respect, creates regard for others, and sets up the law 
of allegiance to the common good. It deals with the 
whole person and not just a part. 

More specifically, the aim of education has to-day be- 
come very concrete and definite. It looks out upon life, 
the life of to-day, and seeks to discover what that life 
demands of the individual as a successful participant in 
the social process, attaining the fullest development and 
satisfaction for himself and contributing most to the wel- 
fare of his generation. What life at its fullest and best de- 
mands of the individual, that education seeks to supply. 

There are three things which life demands of every 
normal person: 

i. Usable knowledge; either (i) to function in the gain- 
ing of other knowledge, or (2) to serve as a guide to 
action, conduct, character, service to others. 

2. Right attitudes; that is, fruitful interests, high ideals, 
worthy loyalties, fine appreciations, noble loves and 
hates, the spirit of artistry in work and achievement, the 
inclination to service, such standards of value as give a 
true philosophy of life. 

3. Skills in living; the power and the will to carry the 
knowledge gained and the attitudes developed directly 
over into daily life and conduct, thus transforming them 
into action, building them into habit, character, achieve- 
ment. 

35 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

This, in brief outline, is a definition of the purpose of 
education as we conceive it in the modern sense. It 
supplies the knowledge necessary to intelligent living in 
the world to-day. It undertakes to stimulate, organize, 
and put into action the great underlying motives that 
control action and conduct. It seeks to make knowledge 
and motive find expression at once in applied skills to be 
developed and used in the everyday run of daily living. 
No element or factor of the life is to be omitted from the 
educational idea, no fundamental need is to be neglected, 
no power, physical, mental, social, or spiritual is to be 
left out. The public school is to be chiefly responsible for 
the physical, the mental, and the social. The church must 
be responsible for the spiritual, the religious. These four 
factors, rightly developed to coordinate with each other, 
will give us a complete system of education for our chil- 
dren, for they provide for the four-fold nature of man and 
meet the demands which life puts upon the individual. 

Now, if education were the narrow thing that many 
still conceive it to be; if it reached only the "head," thus 
training the intellect but leaving the "heart," the great 
source of motives, untouched; if it did not concern itself 
to see that its teachings were carried over into action and 
so into habit and character — if these things were true 
about education, then religious education could mean little 
or nothing, and every person who believes in the spiritual 
outcome of life would be justified in being skeptical as to 
its value for the church. But these things are not true of 
education to-day. Education has entered, in the last two 
decades, upon a new era of meaning and of service. 

This is education in the newer sense, the education 
which gives vital meaning to the term when we say 
"religious education." It is this new meaning of educa- 
tion which renders this proposition true: ''What you would 

3 6 



WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

have in the life of the church you must first put into its 
schools." 

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF RELIGION 

Religion not less than education has recently been 
undergoing a re-definition of meaning and aims, which 
makes it all the more imperative that the educational 
method shall be employed. It is yet too early in the 
process of readjustment now going on to make a full 
interpretation of the changes in religious concepts under 
way, but some of the more outstanding changes of con- 
cept are clear. 

Religion is becoming more of a dynamic function in life, 
both the life of the individual and the life of society. 
Even before the war the pragmatic temper was growing, 
and men were coming to judge the quality of religion less 
by the creed or the order of the ritual than by the way 
personal morals and action and conduct in social relations 
squared with the great basic demands for righteousness, 
justice, and decency as understood by the common 
conscience regardless of theology or creed. The effect of 
the war was, of course, greatly to accentuate and stabilize 
this movement. 

While this age has too keen a sense for psychological 
values to fail to recognize the importance of belief in re- 
ligion, its demand for practical values is so strong that 
it is concerned primarily for the great fundamental beliefs 
held for the most part in common by all Christian groups 
■ — belief in the Fatherhood of God and his goodness to 
men; in the value of righteousness and the curse of sin; 
in the way of living set forth by Jesus of Nazareth. 
Theological niceties and ecclesiastical distinctions have a 
small and decreasing interest for the great mass of persons 
to-day who are interested in religion. They ask for a 

37 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

rule of life, not a complicated statement of creed or a 
particular form of worship. Religion is to be a mode of 
living, a type of character, a system of conduct, and not 
a compartment of the life shut off from the remainder, a 
section of experience attended to on Sundays and then 
locked away until the next Sunday comes about. It is 
to be conceived as an active, working principle starting 
from the very center of the affections, desires, ideals, 
motives, and thence working outward to the periphery of 
the life, giving color and tone and spiritual quality to all 
other phases of experience. What does this is religion, 
and what fails to do this cannot qualify as religion under 
the increasingly practical concept of it. 

Religion is becoming increasingly social in its nature 
and its aims. The older theology made of it a very 
individual matter betv/een one person and his Maker. 
The great goal was a personal salvation, a "getting to 
heaven," a keeping free from the snares and entangle- 
ments of the "world." 

Such a concept is not sufficient for a "social century," 
however. Individual salvation is not lost sight of, but 
a merely selfish personal salvation with great masses of 
society not included in the salvation is becoming un- 
thinkable. "Serving God" is coming in a new and more 
pregnant sense to mean to serve his needy children. Sal- 
vation of the soul is increasingly conceived to be linked 
up with saving the body, the health, the habits, the 
ideals, the interests — indeed, the whole range of the being. 
Life is more and more being looked upon as a unity in 
which one part cannot be "saved" while the remainder 
is neglected and ignored. The "world" is being inter- 
preted in a new sense as the environment in which our 
lives must be lived, and this "world" may itself be trans- 
formed to make it a favorable medium in which to 

38 



WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

cultivate a soul. Indeed, it seems that it may become 
necessary to quit speaking of "the world, the flesh, and 
the devil" in the same breath as natural correlates. 

The view of religion that gives it this practical applied 
trend, that makes it a function of the whole life, that con- 
nects it all seven days of the week with individual and 
social conduct, that makes it an integral part of person- 
ality and character — this vastly fruitful and dynamic 
concept of religion carries with it the inevitable corollary 
that religion is a matter of growth and development, an 
inseparable part of a growing and expanding life expe- 
rience, no more to be attained in a day than any other 
aspect of the nature. This is equivalent to saying that 
religion is best and most effectively to be attained grad- 
ually as a part of nurture and education; for only in that 
way can it be built in with other aspects of experience 
and so made to be a natural expression of the inner self. 

THE MEANING OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

What, then, is religious education? What does it seek 
to do and how does it go at all? 

First, on the negative side, what religious education 
does not do. It does not, as some have feared, seek to 
substitute any process of mere training for the spiritual 
element in religion. It does not leave the divine factor 
out, offering therefor a fund of information about religion. 
It does not deny the fact and power of conversion acting 
on a life that has drifted from its spiritual relationships 
and needs to recover them. It does not aim at an ethical 
system alone, unsupported by the religious motive. In 
short, it does not omit any agency commonly used by the 
church to stimulate and develop the religious conscious- 
ness, with this exception; religious education seeks to save 
the need for a reclamatory conversion, and in its stead 

39 



is 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

substitute a gradual and natural spiritual growth in the 
course of which, at the proper age, the child will make a 
personal decision and acceptance of the Christian way in 
which he has from the beginning been led. 

On the positive side, religious education takes the child, 
endowed through his original nature as he is with capac- 
ities both for evil and good, and seeks to stimulate the 
good and suppress the bad, using for this purpose religious 
instruction, nurture, and guidance. Far from discarding 
or disregarding the supernatural factor, the working of 
the "grace of God," religious education believes so thor- 
oughly in this factor that its great aim is to keep the 
bond between the child and his heavenly Father from 
ever being weakened or broken. It seeks so to train the 
child and stimulate and guide his spiritual development 
that this divine grace shall have constant access to the 
heart and life, a sustaining, organizing, upbuilding power 
acting continuously upon the soul, rather than expecting 
it to reclaim a sin-sick soul which has lost its way. 

Religious education believes in evolution, the evolution 
of the soul. It pins its faith to a slow and steady growth 
of the religious consciousness going on unbroken from the 
earliest years to the end of life. It accepts the position 
that in his spiritual development the child employs the 
same powers of mind and heart and will that are used in 
other avenues of experience and that the law that will 
hold in one realm of experience will hold in another. 

Building upon this position religious education utilizes 
the principles and methods that have been proved suc- 
cessful in other phases of education, adapting them to the 
particular aims and needs of religion. It believes that 
what you would have in the life of a people you must first 
of all put into the schools; and, believing this, undertakes 
to put religion into the (church) schools in such an effec- 

40 



WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

tive way that religious concepts, religious attitudes, and 
religious activities shall become an integral part of the 
child's nature, a part of his inner self, naturally and con- 
tinuously expressed in each day's life as it is lived in the 
common round of responsibilities and duties. 

No one claims that religious education is a panacea. 
There is no magic in it any more than in any other kind 
of education. It uses the method of the tortoise rather 
than the method of the hare. It is not a perfected system, 
nor indeed ever can be. It will never produce one hundred 
per cent of results. Some children, owing to mistakes and 
weaknesses in the religious educational system itself, or 
because of negative influences operating on the child 
from some other phase of his environment, will fail to 
respond, as some fail to respond in the public-school 
system. Some will never be brought under its influence 
at all, either through the lack of appeal of the system or 
the indifference of their parents or some other cause. 

We will remember that about one person out of twelve 
above ten years of age in this country is unable to read 
or write — and this in spite of what is probably one of the 
best systems of general education in the world. There will 
as a matter of course continue to be a certain percentage 
of spiritual illiterates, no matter how perfectly we under- 
take to work out our religious education program. The 
church will always require its other agencies — its pulpit, 
its evangelism, its reform programs, and many other 
enterprises. But these should rest on a solid foundation 
of religious education, which alone can give the church 
an intelligent, loyal, spiritually equipped body of workers 
to carry on its program. 



4i 



CHAPTER IV 
RELIGION THROUGH EDUCATION 

One of the most striking social phenomena of the 
present day is a world-wide renaissance in educa- 
tion. Many years ago von Humboldt said, "What you 
would have in the life of a nation you must first put 
into its schools." Acting on this advice, Germany put 
militarism into her schools and through them made the 
World War. While the war was still in progress every 
great nation involved in the struggle was working to- 
ward the perfecting of plans to use public education as 
a chief instrument of rehabilitation the moment the 
time was ripe. Within a year after the armistice was 
signed England had placed on her statute books the 
most far-reaching educational measure the empire has 
ever seen. France is doing her best to a more effective 
system of national education, as are Germany, Japan, 
China, and the United States. 

What does it mean? Simply that education has been 
newly discovered. The state has come to see that 
whatever of national efficiency, of public health, of 
patriotism, of thrift, of character we would have in our 
nation we must put into its schools so that it will be- 
come a part of the life and experience of our children 
from earliest childhood to maturity. What thus grows 
up with the individual becomes an integral part of him, 
a permanent possession in his life, and so in the social 
aggregate crystallizes finally into national type and 
character. 

Does this principle hold for religion? Are the things 
of the Spirit subject to the same laws of growth and 

42 



RELIGION THROUGH EDUCATION 

development that apply to other aspects of the nature? 
May a full, rich religious consciousness be attained by a 
process of gradual evolution in the individual as it is in 
the race? Can one grow in grace? Can the child be so 
guided, his habits so shaped, his desires so trained, his 
affections so formed, his sense of God's presence and 
meaning in the world and in his own life so cultivated 
that he will never know a moment of conscious separa- 
tion from the Divine, and that when he has arrived at 
the age of personal choice and self-direction he will nat- 
urally and inevitably choose to follow in the Way? Is 
it true that what we want of religion in the life of our 
people we must first put into our (church) schools? Can 
religion be taught? 

THE TESTIMONY OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 

Thousands upon thousands of devout Christians can 
testify to the truth of this statement: Religion can be 
taught. The writer has asked several hundred persons 
to answer the following questions: 

i. Can you point to some particular time or occasion 
when you began the Christian life, in the act commonly 
known as conversion, meaning by this a turning from a 
state of spiritual coldness or indifference or rebellion to a 
recognition of the claims of Christ upon you and a con- 
sciousness of his acceptance of you? Or, 

2. Did you grow so gradually into your present reli- 
gious status that you cannot point to any particular time 
or occasion when you were converted and began the 
Christian life? 

3. In either case, have you had times or experiences 
of personal commitment, re-decision or reconsecration of 
your life to Christ? If so, how often and at about what 
age? 

43 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

These questions are shaped to bring the issue sharply 
between entering upon a consciously religious life sud- 
denly by conversion and gradually by growth. Also, to 
indicate whether it is usual, no matter which has been 
the initial process, for the individual to pass through 
experiences of personal decision, commitment, and re- 
consecration. 

Those to whom the questions were given were persons 
markedly interested in religion, and who presumably 
had a religious consciousness and experience of clear 
and definite sort. Nearly half of them were ministers 
and seminary students preparing for the ministry. The 
remainder were church-school teachers taking work in 
training classes, and university students in departments 
of religious education preparing for special lines of reli- 
gious service. Care was taken to make sure that all 
thoroughly understood exactly what was meant by each 
question. To encourage full and frank statements no 
names were to be signed to the answers. 

About forty-five per cent of the entire number an- 
swered that they had experienced definite conversion. 
About fifty-five said that they could fix no time or 
place of conversion, but from their earliest recollection 
had counted themselves as Christians, having been 
brought up in Christian homes and under religious in- 
struction. Nearly all of both groups testified to passing 
through from one to several times of personal decision 
or affirmation, or of special consecration or definite re- 
commitment to the Christian life. The method of 
entering upon the religious experience, whether by con- 
version or by the normal growth process seemed to make 
no difference on this point, thus indicating that such 
personal affirmation or re-commitment experiences are 
normal and to be expected. 

44 



RELIGION THROUGH EDUCATION 

Of course, the significance of these answers does not 
lie in the particular percentages belonging to each group. 
This will vary among different groups. 1 The point in 
question was whether it is possible for normal, average 
persons to develop a vital religious consciousness and a 
sufficient belief in and concern for religion to be willing 
to enter definitely into its service without having passed 
through the experience called conversion. Another form 
of the question is whether it is possible so to train, in- 
struct, and nurture a child in religion that he will de- 
velop a strong, fine Christian character, never having 
known estrangement from God nor having to be re- 
claimed from a life of spiritual hostility or indifference. 
The indisputable reply to these questions is Yes, It is 
beyond question true that a full, rich, vital religious 
consciousness can be developed by a process of normal 
growth without the necessity of conversion or any emo- 
tional upheaval. 2 Experience proves that religion can be 
taught — not the experience alone of the few hundreds of 
persons concerned in this inquiry, but the experience 
also of many of the world's brightest lights of Christian 
leadership, together with that of hosts of their followers. 
None may doubt that the grace of God is able to save a 
soul through conversion; and none may doubt either 
that it is able to save that soul from the need for con- 
version (that is, of reclamation)! To have to reclaim 
by conversion a soul that should never have known 
separation from the divine is the supreme tragedy. 

THE TESTIMONY OF PSYCHOLOGY 

Psychology joins with common sense and with mod- 



1 Compare the well-known studies of Starbuck and Coe. 

2 Conversion throughout this discussion is used to mean a reclamation and the 
turning from a life of spiritual indifference or rebellion to a life of conscious and 
purposed harmony with God. Acts of re-ccnsecration, re-decision or re-affirmation 
are not called conversion, and should not be. 

45 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

ern theology in not imputing to the child any inherited 
load of guilt bound to him as a child of Adam. Indeed 
psychology is not concerned about "original sin," but 
about original nature. 

Let us take the point of view of the psychologist and 
consider the nature and tendencies of the child. The 
child is the product and culmination of an age-long 
evolution, he bears the impress of a limitless past. The 
blood of a million generations flows through his veins 
and the deeds of countless ages of life stir in his brain. 
He is the product of myriad centuries of conflict and 
battle. And nature has garnered up the fruits of all 
these racial experiences through which every new being 
born into the world has come, and handed them on to 
this child in the form of instincts, impulses, and various 
forms of innate tendencies. 

These native tendencies form the great basic "drives" 
of human nature. They are the starting point for most 
lines of action possessed in common by the race. Most 
of these instinctive drives were at one stage of the 
racial past necessary and good. Possibly some of them 
were always bad. Not all that were once necessary and 
good are so in this day of civilization, though most, 
perhaps all, instincts and impulses play some good part 
in the child's development or in his later life. Even 
these that are now good, however, can be made evil of 
by wrong use or overindulgence. 

Thus it comes about that the child's original nature 
supplies him with an equipment of tendencies and pow- 
ers which form the groundwork of his life but which 
need direction. Some of these instinctive tendencies 
need to be encouraged, trained, educated, set at work as 
motivating forces back of action, conduct, achievement, 
and character. Others of them need to be suppressed 

4 6 



RELIGION THROUGH EDUCATION 

altogether, or at least held strictly in check by being* 
balanced by others of an opposite kind. 

The child's heritage from the past of his race, his 
original nature, the psychologist would call it, gives him, 
therefore, almost limitless capacities both for good and 
for evil. He comes into the world a child of God; he 
has committed no wrong, his moral record is clear. But 
he has had planted in his nature seeds which, if allowed 
to grow and bear fruit, will yield a harvest of sin and 
evil. In that case he will ultimately need conversion to 
cleanse his soul of this spiritual harvest of evil. On the 
other hand he has other seeds planted in his nature 
which, if carefully nurtured from the first and brought 
to fruition, will crowd out or keep down the seeds of 
evil and will bear a harvest of spiritual good-will and 
responsiveness to God and fellow man. In this case no 
conversion will be required, for there will be no growth 
of spiritual coldness or rebellion or purposed evil from 
which to be reclaimed. 

It is not only possible, therefore, but entirely natural 
for the child to grow gradually into a full religious ex- 
perience. It is the great business of education, of reli- 
gious education, to see that he does this very thing. For 
this is by far the best and the safest way. 

Attaining religion through the processes of growth 
and development, that is, through response to religious 
nurture and training during childhood and youth, is 
the best way for many reasons. First of all, this is the 
only method by which religious ideals, habits, and ac- 
tions can be made so much an integral part of the 
nature that they become second nature, no more to be 
put off or laid aside in times of stress or temptation 
than personality itself. It is a well-known biological 
law that only the constants in an environment, those 

47 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

factors that are continuous in their contact with the 
organism, are able to modify organic structure and 
function. Those factors that are only occasional or 
intermittent, that appear only temporarily at certain 
stages in the life history of the individual, produce no 
fundamental and lasting change. 

The same principle holds in the spiritual realm. It is 
those influences that enter the life early and that are 
constant in their pressure on the expanding soul that 
are able profoundly to determine its quality and shape 
the course of its development. Only as religious con- 
cepts are built in with the growing body of the child's 
general fund of knowledge and thought will they be- 
come a part of his mental structure and be a dependable 
factor in shaping decision and action. Only as religious 
feeling and appreciation develop along with other phases 
of feeling and appreciation will they operate normally 
as a part of the motive forces of the life. Only as reli- 
gious acts and deeds become a part of the general 
structure of habits by being interwoven with them as 
they grow and strengthen from earliest childhood will 
religion become an integral part of daily life and 1 ex- 
perience. 

Not without cause is the church concerned over the 
tendency of its members to make religion a formal, 
incidental matter — a something added on as a supple- 
ment or afterthought, rather than a something built in, 
the core of the life. It is lamented that there is so often 
a broad gap between profession and practice, between 
creed and deed, between what the head accepts and 
the conduct expresses. So many persons have a tend- 
ency to make their life upon the plan of water-tight 
compartments, with religion in the Sunday compart- 
ment and pretty much left out of all the rest of the 

48 



RELIGION THROUGH EDUCATION 

week. The remedy? There is one simple formula 
which will come nearer solving this fatal weakness in 
our practice of the Christian religion than any other: 
Make religion an integral part of the child's education 
throughout the whole period of his plastic development. 
Build religious concepts, attitudes, and habits into the 
expanding life from the first, so that they may become an 
inseparable part of its structure. 

True, the adult may become converted. His life may 
be transformed by the strange alchemy of divine power 
working in it. But no life grown to maturity without 
contact with religion can ever make religious thoughts, 
feelings, and actions as natural, inevitable, and effective 
a part of his experience as they would have been had 
they been built into the growing life from the first. 
For such a person religious concepts and values must 
always in some degree be attached to an already built 
mental structure, an addition that was not in the orig- 
inal plan when the structure was building. Introducing 
religion into an adult life that has never known it is like 
trying to graft a new shoot on an old stem. It can some- 
times be done, but it is never quite a complete and 
satisfactory job. The old false proverb, "It is never too 
late to be what you might have been/' should be 
changed to, "It is always too late to be what you might 
have been." 

Besides this difficulty there is the permanent loss of 
those who resist or escape all efforts at reclamation and 
never develop religious interests or establish connec- 
tions with the church. More than half of the adults in 
this country to-day are without church relations or any 
practical interest in religion. 

Now, it may be admitted at the start that no program 
of religious education that could be devised would 

49 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

wholly remedy this unhappy situation. No system 
planned and carried out by human agencies can be 
altogether efficient. Yet it is a much simpler and more 
practicable thing to keep children from going spiritually 
astray than to win them back once the spiritual bonds 
are broken and the habits of the life set in another 
direction. A little prevention is more effective than 
much cure in this realm. Who can believe that if the 
church would devote itself fully and effectively to the 
religious nurture and training of childhood the next 
generation would see more than half of these individuals 
indifferent to the claims of religion and cold or hostile 
to the church! 

THE TESTIMONY OF THE CHURCH ITSELF 

What is the testimony of the church itself as to the 
effectiveness of education as a method of inculcating 
religion? Or has the church made a sufficient trial of 
the educational method to be able to judge of its re- 
sults? Most of the Protestant Church has not. 

It may be objected that the church does believe in 
religious education, else why the Sunday school, which 
is connected with almost every church no matter how 
small? True, the church has the Sunday school, and in 
a moderate sort of way believes in it. Yet, as has al- 
ready been said, the church has used the Sunday school 
chiefly as an evangelistic and not as an educational 
agency. Nor does it believe in the Sunday school 
enough to cause it to make the Sunday school much 
more than an appendage, a minor supplement or ad- 
junct to what are conceived to be the church's main 
activities, namely, preaching, worship, and evangelism 
for adult congregations. 

Another proof that the church has not believed deeply 

50 



RELIGION THROUGH EDUCATION 

. in religious education as a fundamental means of culti- 
vating religion is the fact that it has not questioned until 
recently, and most of the church does not yet question, 
whether the amount of instruction which can be given 
in Sunday school is adequate to meet the needs of the 
child. The right of religion to a part of the week-day 
time or to some time in the vacation period is a new 
thought which the Protestant Church is just now taking 
up. 

There emerges in connection with this point, however, 
a most convincing and inspiring evidence of the value 
of the educational method in religion. This is that 
while the Sunday school is, as a rule, made incidental to 
the remainder of the church program, its teachers largely 
untrained, its equipment usually poor, its organization 
and administration often inefficient, its method any- 
thing but educational in the true sense of the word, 
even with all this handicap the Sunday school is un- 
doubtedly the most fruitful of the church's present-day 
enterprises in the actual making of Christians and the 
grounding of moral characters. Indeed, the church 
owes a very large proportion of its membership to this 
neglected part of its organization. What might not the 
church accomplish through such an educational agency 
if it would take it seriously and make the religious train- 
ing of children its first concern! 

The Roman Catholic among all the churches has been 
the most consistent in the use of the educational method 
in religion. So insistent is this church that religion 
shall be made an integral part of the education of its 
young that Catholic children are withdrawn in large 
numbers from the public schools and sent to the schools 
of the church, where they are taught religion along with 
their geography and grammar. 

5i 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

This statement is not meant to approve the particular 
type of methods used by the Catholic Church; the peda- 
gogy it employs is generations behind the best method 
of the day and grievously ineffective. Nor is the state- 
ment meant to approve the materials taught; many of 
them are utterly unadapted both to the learner and to 
the aims sought. It certainly is not meant to approve 
the withdrawal of children from the public schools in 
order to educate them in parochial schools; this is a 
handicap to the children and, if the policy should be- 
come universal among the churches, would be a blow 
to progress and a danger to the republic. 

What is meant to be pointed out is that the Catholic 
"Church, in spite of its inefficiency in the use of the edu- 
cational method, nevertheless makes that method work. 
For who believes that, did the Catholic Church depend 
on the method of adult evangelism to win adherents to 
its faith and membership, it could attract any large 
number to a theology so out of accord with the spirit 
of modern times, to a church autocracy whose head 
resides in a distant country and whose policy runs coun- 
ter to the genius of democracy, or to a religious organi- 
zation so out of harmony with American ideals and the 
temper of the times! Let the Catholic Church in the 
United States educate its young in religious matters as 
carelessly as the average Protestant church and it would 
break down in a generation. The leaders of the Cath- 
olic Church know this, hence their zeal for religious 
education. Would that all Protestant churches were as 
wise in the matter of policy! Let the Protestant 
churches of this country adopt the policy of the Cath- 
olic Church as to the stress to be placed on religious 
education in the promotion of religion, using at the 
same time the better educational method available to 

52 



RELIGION THROUGH EDUCATION 

the churches, and there is no reasonable objective that 
could not be reached in the field of religious achieve- 
ment. 

Religion can be attained by the processes of gradual 
growth and unfoldment in the life of an individual. 
This is abundantly proved in the experience of many 
persons of the finest spiritual qualities. The developing 
life can be saved by careful nurture and training, that 
is, by proper education in religion, from drifting into 
spiritual coldness, indifference or rebellion. This proc- 
ess of religious development, while it does not deny 
the possibility of reclamatory conversion, is the safer, 
more natural and fruitful, and the one which should 
above all others first be sought by those agencies which 
have responsibility for the religious welfare of the 
children and youth — the home, the church school, the 
church. 



53 



CHAPTER V 
RELIGION THROUGH EVANGELISM 

Certain fundamental distinctions between the edu- 
cational and the evangelistic program in religion have 
already been discussed (Chapter II). While they differ 
widely in their methods, the most fundamental differ- 
ence between these two programs is in the presupposi- 
tions from which they start and in the immediate ends 
sought. 

The educational method presupposes a child at the 
start nonmoral and nonreligious, capable of being made 
by environment and education either immoral or moral, 
either irreligious or religious. The evangelistic method 
presupposes that whatever may be the child's original 
status, it is necessary ultimately for him to pass through 
a process of conversion, before he can enter fully into 
the kingdom. 

Naturally the radically different presuppositions lead 
to the seeking of different ends as the immediate goals 
of effort. The educational method aims primarily at 
conserving, the evangelistic method at reclaiming. The 
procedure by which each of these ends is to be attained 
determines the program to be followed under each 
system. 

HOW THE CHURCH CAME BY THE EVANGELISTIC METHOD 

From one point of view it is incomprehensible how 
so large a proportion of the Protestant Church came to 
stress evangelistic work for adults ahead of educational 
work for children. From another point of view the 
reason for this placing of emphasis is entirely clear. 

54 



RELIGION THROUGH EVANGELISM 

The Protestant Church came into existence as a pro- 
test against spiritual deadness, moral corruption, and 
the decay of religion. Formalism, pretense, and chi- 
canery ruled and had long ruled in the church. Per- 
sonal religious experience, direct responsibility of an 
individual to God, and ethical dynamic coming from a 
living faith were practically unknown. The body of 
Christianity was still alive but its soul was dead. 

Naturally, the leaders of the new church saw the 
necessity of changing this situation if Christianity was 
to be saved. Men must be called to repentance and led 
to seek regeneration of corrupt lives. The power of 
the Spirit to bring back to life the spiritually dead must 
be proved. The transforming power of a vital faith 
must be put to the test. Men and women must be 
converted, hence religious revivals were needed. The 
Wesleys, Whitefield, and other great evangelists later 
took the field and did a marvelous work. New life 
came back into the church, religion again became a 
living spirit and power, righteous living once more 
became the true expression of Christianity. 

For the Protestant Church of that day the*problem 
was, first of all, a problem of reaching the adults and 
introducing them to a living religion. In their spiritual 
deadness they had to be compelled, persuaded, driven 
into the kingdom of a new experience. The evangelistic 
method was probably the best way, possibly the only 
way of accomplishing that result. 

Nor is the attitude of the church of that day with 
reference to the method to use with the children hard 
to understand once we grant the theology that then 
ruled with reference to the child's status. For if the 
child is out of harmony with God by the very fact of 
his existence until by a supreme and cyclonic spiritual 

55 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

upheaval he struggles free from the trammels of an evil 
nature inherited from Adam; and if, once this cyclonic 
experience of conversion has been accomplished the 
child is sufficiently "saved," then manifestly reclama- 
tion is the great need and the entire program of the 
church must be planned to that end. 

The doctrine of hereditary guilt, based on the assump- 
tion that Adam was literally the head of the human race, 
that his acts were the acts of the race, and that in his 
sin all posterity sinned, was first brought into Christian 
theology in the fifth century by Augustine. He says, 
"The infant who is lost is punished because he belongs 
to the mass of perdition and as a child of Adam is justly 
condemned." Calvin adopted and developed these 
views, and in the Reformation they passed over into 
English theology. Calvin taught concerning the status 
of children: "They bring condemnation with them from 
their mother's womb — They are odious and abominable 
to God." This view was incorporated in the West- 
minster Confession and in practically all the other Con- 
fessions of the period of reconstruction. 

Wesley took the position that children are "members 
of the kingdom" and that such "membership assumes 
regeneration." Following the lead of its founder, the 
Methodist Church has continuously committed itself to 
this view of the child's status, the latest statement 
being a reiteration of the position by the General Con- 
ference of 1920. 

Other religious bodies, under the influence of a more 
humane outlook upon life, the acceptance of the doc- 
trine of evolution, and a clearer sense of the Fatherhood 
of God, have softened their stern theologies on this 
point to the extent that the old doctrine of "original 
sin" and "natural depravity" has lost much of its sway. 

56 



RELIGION THROUGH EVANGELISM 

Its effects are yet being felt, however, in the program 
of the church, whatever may be its theology. Even in 
the Methodist Church, one of the most clearly out- 
spoken of all on the question of the child being at the 
beginning right with God, the central program of ac- 
tivities has subordinated the conseroation of the child to 
the reclamation of adults. 

No doubt one important reason for the relatively 
great emphasis placed on adult evangelism is that this 
is in a sense the most obvious and the easiest method. 
The results by this method are more immediate and 
striking. The educational process works slowly. Char- 
acter, morality, and the realization of spiritual ideals 
come but gradually, and without special emotional 
exhilaration or excitement. It is in human nature to 
respond to the striking, the cataclysmic, the sudden. 
A cloudburst excites wonder and awe, but the gradual 
drawing of the water which fell in the storm up from the 
earth by the steady, quiet power of the sun goes on 
without attracting our notice. A thousand converts 
"hitting the sawdust trail" will cause much more thrill 
and comment than ten thousand children advancing 
quietly line upon line and precept upon precept toward 
enlightened Christian character and attainment. 

Furthermore, evangelistic campaigns come cheaper 
financially than educational programs. It costs less to 
finance an evangelistic campaign lasting a few weeks, 
even with a modern high-salaried evangelist, than an 
educational program running for a dozen years. It 
costs less not only in money, but in thought, in planning, 
in effort, in study, and in day-by-day oversight and 
guidance. The evangelistic way is therefore the easy 
way, the cheap way. If it would work as efficiently as 
the educational way, it would be the best way just 

57 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

because it is the simpler, the easier, and the cheaper. 
The difficulty is that it does not work as a substitute 
for the longer drawn out, slower, less sensational but 
altogether more effective educational process in religion. 

THE EVANGELISTIC METHOD HAS AN IMPORTANT 
PLACE 

There is, nevertheless, a very definite place for evan- 
gelism and the evangelistic method in the program of 
the church. Great numbers of men and women need 
to be converted — are being converted under the evan- 
gelistic program of the church. None who have been 
fair and impartial observers of the work of reaching 
indifferent or irreligious persons through the agencies 
commonly employed in evangelistic effort have failed to 
be convinced that human lives are often regenerated 
and transformed by something that happens to them in 
connection with conversion and its consequences. The 
fruits of this regeneration and transformation are seen 
in changed morals, new objectives, and in inner sense 
of harmony with a divine power and plan. The church 
should carry on a large program of this spiritual recla- 
mation. 

Yet it must be conceded that every reclamatory con- 
version is evidence of a failure and a spiritual tragedy. 
Dante says a tragedy is "a bad ending of a good be- 
ginning." Each of these spiritually reclaimed ones 
over whose conversion we rejoice had a good beginning; 
he was at one time right with God, standing at the 
entrance of two paths, one of which leads to an in- 
creasingly broadening and deepening sense of relation- 
ship with God, the other of which leads away from the 
consciousness of religious values and to the necessity of 
a special act of divine power and grace to bring the 

58 



RELIGION THROUGH EVANGELISM 

individual back to a recognition of spiritual things. 
Let us repeat, there is no greater tragedy than the need 
to reclaim a soul that should not have been allowed to 
go astray. 

Evangelism is therefore essentially a method for 
adults — for those who, either from lack of religious 
nurture and training in childhood or from some combi- 
nation of circumstances have failed to respond to reli- 
gious influences and have grown up to years of conscious 
self-direction ignorant of these things, indifferent to 
them, or in a state of spiritual disaffection. Evangelism 
should be a supplement to the method of religious edu- 
cation. It should seek, on the one hand, to reclaim 
those who, because of failure in the religious educational 
system or because of failure of the child to respond to it, 
drift away from the church and spiritual interests. It 
should seek, on the other hand, to reclaim all possible 
of those who have had no opportunity at religious edu- 
cation and so are naturally indifferent and ignorant in 
religious matters. The real work of evangelism should 
be to "mop up" after religious education, gathering in 
all possible of those whom it has missed. 

But in no case should the church neglect its educa- 
tional program for its evangelistic. Conservation of 
childhood should never give way to reclamation of 
adults. A child kept in the "way" is better than a 
grown person returned to that "way." Furthermore, 
the more effective the program of religious education is 
made the less will be the need for reclamation. 

RESULTS OF THE EVANGELISTIC PROGRAM 

Certain undesirable results are bound to follow from 
the evangelistic system, especially if it is not combined 

59 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

with a definite system of religious education. One of 
these is an unintelligent, untrained church constituency, 
ignorant of the Bible and of the great fundamentals of 
religious thought and faith. Another is the inevitable 
and perfectly natural tendency of the untrained convert 
to "fall from grace/' to "backslide/' and to require to be 
reconverted. 

One who has lived a life of spiritual neutrality or hos- 
tility may be challenged, convicted of sin, brought to 
repentance and conversion. This has occurred tens of 
thousands of times. A new set of motives, new goals of 
ambition, new ideals of conduct are set up. The things 
that were loved are now hated and the things that were 
hated are now loved. The new convert joins the church, 
receives the joyful welcome of preacher and congrega- 
tion, and is now one of the elect in a very real and true 
sense. And yet . . . The man who was before ig- 
norant of the Bible is ignorant of it still; he who was 
unfamiliar with the simple but potent message of Jesus 
is ignorant of it stilL He who has lacked a knowledge 
of the great characters of the Bible and of the church 
is ignorant still. He who was a religious illiterate is 
illiterate still. 

Conversion may reconstruct the motive forces of life 
and reorganize its powers, but it does not supply the 
fundamental knowledge, intelligence, and information 
upon which alone true Christianity can be built. 

So the church that has any vision or sense of obliga- 
tion is inevitably committed to the education of its 
constituency even if it depends primarily on the method 
of evangelistic reclamation for its members. If it does 
not educate children and youth in religious matters, it 
will in the end be obliged to educate these same persons 
after, older grown, they are reclaimed by conversion. 

60 



RELIGION THROUGH EVANGELISM 

And they educate more easily and naturally by far if it 
is done in the earlier years. 

As a matter of fact, however, the church usually does 
not educate its converts any more than it does its chil- 
dren; perhaps not so much. Seeming to assume that 
the great thing needful is accomplished when the new 
convert is able to testify to a conscious acceptance by 
the Divine, the church is all too prone to open the doors 
of membership, enter the new name on the church roll, 
and call the whole matter closed. The result is an un- 
intelligent, confused Christian whose emotional exalta- 
tion soon passes away and who, lacking the great basic 
religious concepts that can develop only by the slow 
process of teaching and learning, either becomes dis- 
couraged, thinks he was mistaken or deceived, and 
drops the whole matter. 

What a tragically large proportion of those who have 
embraced the Christian life under the influence of an 
evangelistic appeal soon fall away into a state of indif- 
ference! In such cases the seed falls on ready soil and 
springs up quickly, but the soil is not rich and deep 
through thorough cultivation, hence the new growth 
quickly dies down. Conversion is usually accomplished 
under high emotional tension. It is followed by a feeling 
of deep peace, satisfaction, and soul quiet or exaltation. 
The change from the previous unrest and unhappiness 
is so marked that the entire world seems changed. Life 
can never be the same humdrum thing again. The way 
ahead grows with a beautifully radiant light. And thus 
the new convert enters hopefully, confidently on the 
way. 

But emotional heights (or depths) do not last. It is 
not in human nature to live constantly on the highest 
altitudes nor in the deepest valleys. Tension tends to 

61 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

relax. Feeling becomes less keen, The contrast be- 
tween the old state and the new grows less striking. 
Something of the radiance expressing a glow of inner 
feeling dims out. Things are settling back into their 
old perspective. Life has something of routine and 
humdrum and commonplace just as it had before. Ques- 
tions begin to arise! Was I mistaken, did I only think 
I was converted? Am I of such a nature that I cannot 
"hold out"? Am I drifting back? Am I a Christian 
after all? 

Some such cruel and soul-numbing experience has 
been passed through by numberless persons who might, 
by preparatory training, have been saved from the 
sweating of blood which the disillusioning process en- 
tails. 

Those who have been properly instructed in what it 
means to be a Christian; who have been led to give 
proper balance to religious thought, feeling, and action 
from early childhood, and who are not led to stake their 
entire religious certitude on the play of a fluctuating 
emotion will escape such an experience when the time 
comes for them to make a personal acceptance of the 
Christian way they have been taught. Nor, having 
once made this personal decision, will there be the 
danger of shipwreck on the ground of a changing mood. 
For the person who has a well-grounded set of religious 
concepts that have grown up with him from childhood, 
who has a well-defined set of religious habits expressing 
themselves normally in such acts as prayer, worship, 
and service, who is religiously intelligent, is secure 
against the accidents of temporary emotional changes. 



62 



CHAPTER VI 

THE CHURCH'S NEGLECT OF RELIGIOUS 
EDUCATION 

The Protestant Church has never taken religious 
education seriously. This seems a strange, an ungracious, 
even a false thing to say of a church that has founded 
schools and colleges by the hundred, that, indeed, pre- 
ceded the state in its support of general education. 
Nevertheless, it is true — the church has never taken 
religious education seriously. It has been a great believer 
in and promoter of general education but not of religious 
education. The proofs of this proposition form the con- 
tent of the present chapter. 

HOW THE SUNDAY SCHOOL CAME TO THE CHURCH 

It is strikingly true in the history of human institutions 
that progressive movements and reforms often come 
from other sources than those where we should naturally 
turn for leadership. This has been true for the church, 
some of whose most important movements have orig- 
inated entirely outside the professional and official group 
commissioned by the church to guide its destinies. 

Robert Raikes is credited with the initiation of the 
Sunday school. Robert Raikes was an English manu- 
facturer and merchant. He possessed no great learning; 
certainly, he was no theologian. A member of the Church 
of England in a time when the state had not yet taken 
responsibility for general education, Raikes wak im- 
pressed with the ignorance, the vice, and the squalor of 
the children of the poor in Gloucester, England. They 
were illiterate, profane, dirty, ragged, ill-mannered, im- 
moral. 

63 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

Free schools did not exist, and their parents were 
unable to pay tuition for their education, even had they 
been interested enough in education to do so. Social 
outcasts, neglected by state and church, ignored by 
society, they were a reproach to the civilization of their 
day. Robert Raikes said they must be taught — taught 
religion and the rudiments of education. So he hired 
teachers, and paid them a shilling or so a day from his 
own pocket. He secured the use of a part of the church 
for his classes, which met on Sunday for several hours. 
The children were taught personal cleanliness, good 
manners, reading, writing, numbers — and religion; a cur- 
riculum suspiciously like the general education program 
with religion added. 

At first many of the churches were opposed to this prof- 
anation of the Lord's Day and of the church with the 
teaching of the children. The Archbishop of Canterbury 
thundered against this new movement. Many of the 
churches closed their doors to it. But the movement had 
life, so it grew in spite of opposition; first despised, then 
tolerated, at last adopted by the church which had not 
the vision to inaugurate the movement itself. As pro- 
vision was made for the free general education of children 
in England the secular subjects were dropped from the 
Sunday school curriculum and its aims centered on re- 
ligion; though to this day the Sunday school movement 
in the Church of England has never been quite popular 
among the social classes. The stigma of its lowly origin 
still clings to it. 

When, a century and a quarter ago, American Protes- 
tantism took up the Sunday-school idea there was far 
from unanimity upon it. At first many of the churches 
opposed it. Some closed their doors to the Sunday 
classes, urging that it was unfit that God's house should 

64 



THE CHURCH'S NEGLECT 

be put to such uses. The church was a place for worship, 
for prayer, for preaching, and none should profane the 
the sacred edifice by bringing into it the teaching of 
children. Here, again, however, the forces for education 
finally won and the Sunday school about one hundred 
years ago became a recognized part of the church's 
legitimate enterprises. 

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION LOOKED UPON AS INCIDENTAL 

During no period of its history, however, has the Sun- 
day school been looked upon by those in control of the 
church as a major enterprise. In making up the program 
of the church as a whole, or the program of an individual 
unit, religious education of children has been planned for 
and provided for only after other interests had been taken 
care of. 

There have been many worthy projects planned and 
carried out by the church. There have been great mis- 
sionary campaigns which brought splendidly to the con- 
sciousness and the conscience of the church the needs of 
the less fortunate in this and other lands. There have 
been great campaigns for group and personal evangelism 
which have netted many souls reclaimed. There have 
been educational campaigns, seeking moral and monetary 
support for church colleges and other secular schools of 
the church. There have been great financial campaigns 
netting scores of millions of dollars for the church to ex- 
pend on its excellent enterprises. Now, all of these are 
worthy projects and most of them were well carried out. 
There is no disposition on our part to criticize or do any- 
thing but admire and approve this splendid work. But 
the question still remains, just when did the church have a 
great campaign for the promotion of the cause of religious 
education? 

65 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

Consider the program of Sunday services of the church. 
It is built primarily around the interests of adults. In 
many churches the choicest hour of the forenoon, the 
time most convenient for adults after late rising, a 
leisurely breakfast and preparation for church, is taken 
for the "regular service"; the Sunday school coming at 
the close of the forenoon, at a time when children on other 
days usually have dinner or lunch and when the day has 
lost for them its best of spirits and freshness. True, in 
some churches the children are recently being given a 
more favorable hour, but the more general practice is yet 
to consult the convenience and wishes of the adults first, 
the children being secondary. 

The advice is quite generally given to parents by 
church leaders that children should be taken to the 
church preaching service in preference to any other exer- 
cise of the church. When the children come to this 
service they find almost nothing they can understand, 
little they can intelligently feel, and practically nothing 
they can do except to sit in an agony of suppressed 
wriggling longing for the ending to come. It is a service 
of adults, for adults and by adults. Yet by strange con- 
fusion of thought there are those who believe this the best 
way to train the child in religion! Paul was a preacher 
rather than an educator, but he had some well-defined 
notions about the futility of forcing strong meat upon 
babes. 

That the church has had little interest in the educa- 
tional method in religion is seen in the course prescribed 
for the training of its ministers. They are, of course, 
trained primarily as theologians and preachers. They 
must have courses in historical theology, in systematic 
theology, and in practical theology. They must know 
Greek and Hebrew in order to skill in biblical exegesis. 

66 



THE CHURCH'S NEGLECT 

They must study the principles and art of sermon struc- 
ture in order to convince, persuade, move — adults. They 
must master the arts of speech in order to smooth and 
effective public utterance. They must train themselves 
in the methods of evangelism in order successfully to con- 
duct campaigns for converts. 

Here, again, we have a list of things all of which are 
good. But where does the training of the minister for 
religious education come in? I am aware that most theo- 
logical seminaries now offer a few courses in religious 
education. Some of them even require some four hours 
out of about ninety demanded for the degree. Not a few 
offer no religious education work of any kind nor take any 
note of its importance. 

So it happens that most ministers go out from their 
three years of seminary work with little or no training for 
the hardest task they will confront, for the hardest task 
the church confronts. It is easy enough for them to 
preach well-organized sermons out of a well-stocked mind 
to a congregation of well-ordered adults. But in the 
presence of the children, with their infinitely greater needs 
and their infinitely more difficult demands, the preacher 
is relatively helpless. Nor is it primarily his fault. In a 
day of education and of educational experts, a day when 
the church should change its method and its stress from 
a program primarily of preaching to adults to a program 
which provides first of all for the teaching of children in 
religion, the church trains its leaders and workers in 
everything except the most important and difficult thing 
they have to do. 

No wonder, therefore, that the average preacher feels 
somewhat helpless before a group of children. No wonder 
he watches with a sigh of relief his "junior congregation" 
file out after the ten-minute sermon that was much 

6 7 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

harder to prepare than the thirty-minute sermon that will 
follow. No wonder that the preacher not infrequently 
leaves the Sunday school largely to the superintendent 
and officers, concerning himself with it only to see that it 
turns in fairly satisfactory reports as to attendance and 
collections. 

And no wonder either that hundreds of young min- 
isters, awakening to the fact that the chief problem of 
their church concerns itself with education, are crying out 
against a system that leaves them unprepared for the 
greatest opportunity and responsibility that rests upon 
the church. The church should make training in re- 
ligious education one of the chief lines in the preparation 
of its ministers. 

Possibly the most immediately obvious evidence of the 
church's failure to realize the importance of religious 
education is seen in the architecture of its church build- 
ings. It is evident, of course, that the church structure 
has been built for adults. The central aspect is an 
audience room, a place for grown-ups to listen to preach- 
ing. When the adults have been taken care of, there may 
be some Sunday school rooms provided — as a supplement 
or an afterthought to the main plan of the building. But 
even these are usually highly insufficient in number and 
capacity, and inadequate for their purpose. 

If the church ever becomes a true teaching institution, 
centering its best efforts on serving its children instead of 
selfishly looking out for its adults; if those of us who are 
in charge shall refuse to take the best seats in the syna- 
gogue for ourselves regardless of the helpless little ones; 
if we really go at it to set a child in our midst as the goal 
of our church effort, then the church architects and 
building committees will need to study their problems 
anew. When this day comes, as please God it will come 

68 



THE CHURCH'S NEGLECT 

before a great while, these architects and builders can 
learn much by going to the public schools and studying 
their architecture. Here the purpose is first of all to pro- 
vide for teaching, though the assembly (audience) room 
is not omitted from the scheme. The result is a highly 
effective working plant for the development of the whole 
life of the pupil. 

The relative importance assigned religious education 
of children in the estimation of the church may be dis- 
covered from the distribution of funds in its budget. The 
things that people believe in and care for they are willing 
to pay for; the things they esteem of little value or think 
about but little they do not consider spending money for. 
Willingness to supply economic support is then one 
practical test of the interest and esteem in which the 
membership of the church holds its various enterprises. 

Now, it is a well-known fact that in general the Sunday 
school is supported by the pennies of the children who 
attend. True, many churches are coming to add a small 
amount annually to their budget for the support of the 
Sunday school, but this is the exception rather than the 
rule. Not only is this true, but the Sunday schools of one 
denomination at least are expected to pay an aggregate 
of two hundred thousand dollars a year toward the sup- 
port of the board which manages the Sunday school 
activities of the denomination. Sunday schools are poorly 
equipped in reference to books, teaching supplies, pro- 
fessional libraries for teachers, etc., because the church 
"cannot afford it." 

It all comes down finally to what the church believes in 
or wants to spend its money for. A certain church re- 
cently had a local budget of over thirty thousand dollars, 
one thousand of which was assigned to religious educa- 
tion. In this church there was a pastor's assistant on a 

69 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

salary of three thousand; an office secretary on a salary 
of twelve hundred; paid singers on salaries of four thou- 
sand; the support of a city mission on an expenditure of 
about five thousand. The minister had a salary of about 
six thousand. The matter of a director of religious educa- 
tion came up, but the church "could not afford it." The 
question of week day religious education for children was 
discussed, but the church "had no more funds for re- 
ligious education." In this church budget the adults were 
willing to spend approximately thirty dollars on them- 
selves to one dollar spent on the children of the church 
for religion. They were willing to hire professional 
singers to sing to the adult congregation for fifteen or 
twenty minutes each Sunday, paying them ninety 
dollars for the service rendered, but could not find 
money to equip properly for teaching their children nor 
for paying for week-day teachers or directors for their 
classes in religion. While these figures and the details 
will vary from church to church, the example cited is so 
nearly typical that it may, with generous and increasing 
exceptions, be called characteristic of the church. 

Another indication of the center of emphasis in the 
church is found in the trend which conspicuous greatness 
among its leaders has taken. Greatness commonly takes 
the direction of the most pressing social demand and the 
willingness of institutions to pay in honors, position, or 
money for service rendered. 

The church has had great evangelists, great mis- 
sionaries, great theologians, great scholars, great artists, 
great preachers, great reformers, all willing to give of their 
talent or their genius to the church and making thereby 
a great contribution. But where are the great educators 
in the service of the church? They have been few. This 
has not been because great educators have not been in- 

70 



THE CHURCH'S NEGLECT 

terested in religion and childhood and the church, but 
because the church has not invited them, welcomed their 
services, or made a place for them. Hence it is that now, 
when the church is beginning to realize the importance of 
education in religion, she has few trained educators in her 
service and must perforce suffer the blind to lead the 
blind or else call upon the ranks of secular education to 
supply the skilled leadership her own program has failed 
to develop. 

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN CHURCH COLLEGES 

Let no one ascribe the church's lack of interest in 
religious education to a lack of interest in education. The 
church has for centuries, as we have said, made the pro- 
motion of education one of its chief concerns, and its 
schools constitute one of the brightest pages in its history. 
The earliest colleges founded in this country were founded 
by the church. Far more than half of all the higher insti- 
tutions in the United States to-day were church founded 
and many of them still are, in part at least, church sup- 
ported. The church-founded colleges and universities 
accommodate approximately half of those who receive 
higher education in this country. 

Yet, strange to say, religion occupies so small a place 
as to be almost negligible in the curriculum of the church 
colleges. In almost none of them is instruction in religion 
on as secure a financial and academic basis as mathe- 
matics, science, philosophy, or like subjects. The college 
asks for the support of church people on the ground of 
the religious influence of the school, but seems to assume 
that religion can be appropriated from the general atmos- 
phere and environment and need not be especially 
provided for as a study for the classrooms. Indeed, on 
this score there is comparatively little choice between the 

7i 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

church college and the state institution. Here again, 
then, it is evident that the church does not believe 
strongly in religious education, for its own particular 
schools set apart to "train leaders" teach almost every- 
thing excepting religion. 



72 



CHAPTER VII 

IF THE CHURCH SHOULD ADOPT AN 
EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM 

The writer recently came before his class of seventy- 
seven young ministers with the following proposition 
which he asked them to consider in all its bearings and 
determine whether or not it is true: The primary re- 
sponsibility and obligation of the church, standing above 
all other responsibilities and obligations whatsoever, is the 
religious education of its childhood and youth. After full 
and deliberate thought all but four answered in the 
affirmative, thus committing the church so far as they 
are concerned to the religious education of the young 
as its primary function. 

Manifestly, the unanimity of position taken required 
that another question be asked these men. It was put 
to them in this form: // the foregoing proposition is true, 
what are its implications: what should the church do about 
it? 

This is probably the most important question con- 
fronting the Christian church to-day. Here is a church 
which in an era favorable for its development and ex- 
pression has barely been holding its own; no, let us be 
frank; it has been losing ground. Now, it is offered an 
instrument, proved in other fields than the church, 
which can readily be adapted to the uses of the church 
and through which it is reasonably certain that the 
church can recover lost ground and enter upon new 
territory. This instrument is religious education. What 
will the church do about it? 

73 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

In order to make religious education its primary en- 
terprise in practice, great and fundamental changes will 
have to be made by the church. These changes cannot 
be made in a day. Many of them cannot be completely 
made in a decade. But, under wise leadership, all the 
changes can be put under way and developed as rapidly 
as conditions will permit. 

AN EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP 

Fundamental to an educational program for the 
church is a true educational leadership. No enterprise 
can succeed if managed by those who are not fully in 
sympathy with it, or those who do not understand its 
fundamental aims, or those not equipped with the skill 
of technique necessary to the operation of the enter- 
prise. 

Freely granting certain notable exceptions, it may 
fairly be asserted that the present leadership of the 
church is not an educational leadership. This is said 
without thought or intention of criticism of present 
leaders, many of whom have rendered service beyond 
praise to the church. But most of these men have come 
up through another regime. To them the great work of 
the church has been to "preach the gospel." The pul- 
pit has been their throne, the preacher the man called 
of God to the most important work given man to do as a 
colaborer with the Divine, the proclaiming of glad tid- 
ings to lost souls. 

To such men, themselves usually great and inspiring 
preachers and men grown gray in the service of this 
great ideal, it is natural and perhaps inevitable that 
other phases of the church's program should be second- 
ary to preaching. They may believe in a way in the 
work of the Sunday school, believe even in the expan- 

74 



IF THE CHURCH SHOULD ADOPT A PROGRAM 

sion of the program of Sunday instruction to the work 
of week-day classes in religion, or to vacation church 
day schools; but as to making the educational enter- 
prise of the church its chief concern, the first thing 
planned for in its policies, the pearl of great price which 
the church should sell all else to buy. . . . 

It is humanly impossible for most men well past 
middle life, as the leaders of the church naturally are, 
to make so complete a reversal of brain paths as this 
position would require. They may see the validity of 
the new program, they may wish it well, they may 
even mean to give it their support; but most of them 
will nevertheless, unintentionally or not, have a back- 
ground of reservations, a set of conflicting ideals and 
habits of mind, speech and action, which will qualify or 
negate their support of the new project. 

The control of the church should gradually, but with- 
out unnecessary delay, be taken over by those possessed 
of the educational ideal for the church. Usually, though 
with notable exceptions, this will mean by the younger 
men who, in connection with their training for service 
in the church have given a prominent place to the study 
of religious education and who understand both its pos- 
sibilities and its limitations. Such men will, of course, 
know religious educational method. They will under- 
stand its problems and principles of organization and 
administration. They will know how so to plan the 
program of the church that the religious nurture and 
training of children shall become its primary concern, 
without at the same time neglecting the other enter- 
prises of the church. 

It goes without saying that these religious educa- 
tional leaders will have to be developed and trained. 
The church has now relatively few men who by training, 

75 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

conviction, and experience are able to assume leader- 
ship such as that required in this new field. But the 
number qualified to do this is increasing. Prospective 
ministers in the theological schools are not only gladly 
taking the required courses in religious education, but 
many of them are electing as freely as their require- 
ments will permit the courses in religious education and 
general education from adjoining university depart- 
ments. These men are in earnest; they see the great 
opportunity before them to serve the church and the 
cause of religion, and the next decade will witness num- 
bers of them beginning to forge ahead into positions of 
educational leadership now unoccupied because none 
are ready to fill them. The success of the church in the 
years that lie ahead will depend in no small degree on 
the wisdom and capacity for leadership manifested by 
its ministers of education. 

A NEW EMPHASIS IN THE TRAINING OF ITS 
MINISTRY 

If the point of view set forth in the preceding section 
is accepted, we are immediately led to a second inevit- 
able conclusion: The church must change the em- 
phasis in the training of its ministry. The tradition is 
deeply grounded that the minister shall be trained as a 
theologian and a preacher. One young minister-in- 
training, puzzled by conflicting claims for preeminence 
between the evangelistic and the educational ideal for 
the church, exclaimed, "But surely our great commission 
as servants of the church is to preach the gospel, is it 
not?" 

"Not if I understand the matter," answered his in- 
structor. "I understand your great commission to be 

7 6 



IF THE CHURCH SHOULD ADOPT A PROGRAM 

that of bringing the world to know and follow the teach- 
ings and example of Jesus. If you can do this best by 
preaching, that is your great commission. If you can 
do it best by teaching, then that is your great commis- 
sion." 

Preaching, like teaching, is a means and not an end. 

It will not serve for the schools supplied by the church 
for the training of its ministers to admit half grudgingly 
a few courses on religious education as a concession to 
the demands of the times, allowing these to supplement 
a broad and dominating requirement in theology, the 
languages, and exegesis. The door must be thrown wide 
open and without any grudging. If the educational 
method can be made and should be made the chief 
instrument of the church in gathering, training, and 
holding its constituency, then there is no place for half- 
way measures. The church must acknowledge this 
method and prepare its ministers to handle it success- 
fully. Training in the principles and methods of reli- 
gious education must not be incidental and perfunctory, 
something added on to the real and fundamental prepara- 
tion for their work, an important accessory, but still an 
accessory. 

These men must come from their preparation not 
only with some knowledge of religious educational 
method, but with the educational ideal prominent in 
their minds, the educational viewpoint dominant in 
their thought and plans. Anything less than this will 
not serve if the church sets out really to take religious 
education seriously as a highly important function. 

One of the first requisites of the minister is to be 
grounded through his training in the educational view- 
point for religion, is to supply him with an educational 
atmosphere in which to get his training. It is doubtful 

77 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

whether this can be done in the average theological 
seminary of the present day. This is not meant as a 
criticism on the seminaries, but the fact, of course, is 
that the traditions and atmosphere of the theological 
schools do not favor the educational method. They 
have for generations been of another kind, and such 
things cannot be changed offhand and at will. 

Doubtless some of the schools of theology will make 
an honest effort to meet the new conditions. There are 
indications that some are already attempting to do so. 
Those seminaries that are connected with universities 
will effect the transformation with least difficulty, for 
the university departments of general education and 
religious education are at hand to supply the educa- 
tional tone and train to the educational ideal. 

However the details may be worked out, it seems 
inevitable that the courses offered by the church for 
the training of the ministers must be still further lib- 
eralized in the direction of practical training for the 
demands which the church program of the future must 
of necessity put upon its minister. The great problems 
of the average minister are no longer, as they once were, 
problems of theology, of exegesis, of refined and hair- 
splitting exposition of controversial problems. Most 
Christian churches of to-day are thoroughly agreed 
upon enough great fundamentals to save the world if 
only these fundamentals could be made effective in the 
lives of the people. The great problem of the church in 
this age is to make of itself the effective instrument by 
which the basic Christian truths can be planted in the 
minds and hearts of youth and so cultivated, nurtured, 
and guarded that they shall come to fruitage as Chris- 
tian character in adults. 



78 



IF THE CHURCH SHOULD ADOPT A PROGRAM 

A MINISTRY OF EDUCATION 

For many years the smaller churches will have to be 
content with one minister to carry out all functions of 
the church. The man who preaches the sermons and 
acts as pastor will in addition have to be business man- 
ager, director of religious education, director of recrea- 
tion, and responsible for whatever additional program 
the church assumes. This wide diversity of responsi- 
bility precludes highly specialized training in any par- 
ticular line, thus making the office of the minister in 
this type of church correspond somewhat to that of 
general family practitioner in the field of medicine. 

In larger and stronger churches, however, the time is 
undoubtedly coming when there will be a specialized 
ministry covering various lines of activity within the 
local church. Second to none in this group of min- 
isters should be the minister of education. His position 
should be coordinate with that of the minister of preach- 
ing. His general and professional preparation for the 
work should be commensurate with the responsibilities 
involved, which are certainly not less than those of the 
pulpit. The financial compensation should not suffer in 
comparison with that for the preaching minister. 

The minister of education should, under the educa- 
tional committee of the church, have responsibility for 
the planning and administration of the educational 
program in all of its branches and divisions. He should 
recommend or appoint teachers, assign them to classes, 
be responsible for the grading and promotion of pupils, 
determine curriculum requirements, and carry out all 
other such administrative functions under the general 
oversight of the committee. 

A number of denominations have already provided 
for this office, recognizing officially the minister of edu- 

79 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

cation though not always as coordinate in power and 
responsibility with the preaching minister, who is held 
primarily responsible for all interests and activities of 
the church. 

Not until the educational ministry of the church is 
recognized and provided for, first in the preparation of 
the general preaching ministry, and, second, in the 
training and employment of a highly specialized educa- 
tional ministry when the size of the church permits, will 
the interests of religious education be fully recognized 
in the economy of the church. 

CHANGE OF EMPHASIS IN CHURCH PROGRAM 

If the church is to make religious education its great 
concern there must be a distinct change in emphasis at 
certain points of its program. At the present time, as 
we have seen, religious education does not receive great 
relative emphasis at the hands of the church. Some of 
the tests of the importance placed on any enterprise by 
the church are the following: 

i. The amount of time, thought, energy expended com- 
pared with the magnitude of the problem or the work 
to be done. 

2. The amount of money expended compared with 
the need for funds in order to secure efficiency. 

3. The place occupied by the enterprise in the interest 
and esteem of the church as compared with its other 
enterprises. 

4. The place given the interests and problems of the 
enterprise in the councils, discussions, and plans of 
church leaders. 

5. The relative efficiency and success in carrying out 
the enterprise as compared with the efficiency and suc- 
cess in other enterprises. 

80 



IF THE CHURCH SHOULD ADOPT A PROGRAM 

Measured by such tests as these, it is probable that 
the major enterprises of the church as conceived by its 
present leaders would be listed somewhat in this order: 

i. Preaching; ministry for adult congregations. 

2. Evangelism; efforts to secure reclamatory conver- 

sions. 

3. Missionary activities; at home and abroad. 

4. General education; schools and colleges. 

5. Religious education; chiefly in Sunday schools. 

6. Publishing; religious books, papers, etc. 

This is to say, measured by the tests suggested, reli- 
gious education probably does not come higher than 
fifth from the head of a list of six of the church's leading 
activities of the present. At least it certainly is a long 
way from coming first. 

Let it again be reiterated in this connection that in 
making such a comparison there is no thought of dis- 
paraging any of the other great and worthy enterprises 
of the church. The point is that religious education 
should come first because it is at the root of all the others. 
Religious education will create an intelligent and loyal 
congregation for the preacher; even where reclamatory 
evangelism proves necessary it will in some degree have 
prepared the soil for the reception of the message of the 
evangelist and for the action of divine grace in the heart; 
it will broaden the sympathies and increase the intelli- 
gence of our people with reference to missionary needs; 
it will supply the motives which will insure the proper 
use of the powers developed through general education; 
it will train and educate a reading public for religious 
materials published by the church. The purpose of 
religious education is, therefore, not to supplant or 
overtop other activities of the church, but only to lay 

81 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

firm and strong the foundations on which they all may- 
build. This it can do and will do if given a chance. 

If this is to be accomplished, the church must get a 
new perspective on the relative importance of its enter- 
prises. It must not undertake to build without founda- 
tions. It must see to it that religious education is given 
the full measure which its importance demands of the 
time, thought, and energy of the church; that it has its 
proper share of the church's funds; that in public in- 
terest and esteem it takes high rank; that in actual 
working efficiency and achieved results it does not 
suffer when compared with other church enterprises. 
In order to accomplish these results great and funda- 
mental changes of emphasis must be made in the pro- 
gram of the church. 

A REDISTRIBUTION OF THE CHURCH'S BUDGET 

The church, as an organization, spends compara- 
tively little on the religious education of its young. 
Now, conceivably this might come either from the 
possibility of getting the necessary teaching done free, 
as in the home and in the Sunday school, or it might 
come from failure to recognize that here is one of the 
most fruitful places for the expenditure of church funds. 

So little does the average church look upon the reli- 
gious education of children as a thing to be paid for 
that it usually does not even put an appropriation for 
the Sunday school in its budget, or, as we have already 
seen, if it does, the amount is so small that it is prac- 
tically negligible. The members of the Sunday school 
by their own contributions pay for their lesson ma- 
terials or other supplies required. 

Now, this is not meant to argue that the pupils in the 
Sunday school should not pay toward the support of 

82 



IF THE CHURCH SHOULD ADOPT A PROGRAM 

the church and its enterprises; they should, for this is a 
part not only of their obligation, but of their training. 
They should, however, pay toward the support of their 
church, and then in addition, class by class or the school 
as a whole, should directly contribute to various benev- 
olent, religious, and missionary enterprises as oppor- 
tunity offers. 

The point is that the religious education of its chil- 
dren, in the Sunday school or whatever other schools of 
religion the church may run, is a vital part of the 
church's program and should come in on the distribu- 
tion of its budget the same as the expenditure for 
preaching, benevolences, missionary work, and the like. 
The financing of this important function of the church 
should not be something supplemental, a side line, an 
extra to be taken care of by odds and ends of subscrip- 
tion, or a gift now and then to make up for a deficit. 
In fact, one of the best tests of the church's regard for 
religious education is the way it is treated in the church 
budget. 

Besides the change of policy here suggested the church 
must, if it is to make religious education a primary in- 
terest, spend much more money on this work than Jias 
been done in the past. The teaching in the Sunday 
school should probably for the most part continue at 
least for the present to be done without pay. The 
supervision should, at least in all larger schools, be paid 
for, and the amount of preparation and time devoted to 
it correspondingly increased. In the largest schools the 
supervisors of departments should receive a moderate 
compensation and then make a real profession out of 
their work. To those who fear that such service would 
lose its fine quality if paid for, we need but say that 
this objection does not seem to hold for the preacher 

83 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

(who at first was not paid for his work) nor the mission- 
ary (who likewise formerly worked without pay). 

When the church takes up week-day instruction in 
religion and vacation church schools in a large way, as 
it must do if it is to make religious education a leading 
interest, then it must be prepared to spend thousands 
where it is now spending hundreds of dollars. For these 
systems cannot be run on a basis of free service. There 
will be large bills to pay for teaching, for textbooks, and 
for equipment. 

APPLY EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS TO THE CHURCH 
SCHOOL 

As has already been pointed out, the aims of the 
church school in the past have hardly been educational 
in the true sense. The child was expected to absorb 
impressions from contact with the church and the 
teacher. The mere "going to Sunday school" was sup- 
posed to possess some special spiritual potency able to 
count for righteousness, no matter what went on there. 
In all too many schools the standards of success and 
efficiency have gone no further than: 

Enrollment to-day 489; one year ago to-day 476 
Attendance to-day 250; one year ago to-day 253 
Teachers present 10; teachers absent 12 

Visitors 5. 

Collection $2.63; collection last Sunday $2.56. 

Usually in the recording and presenting of such statis- 
tics as these there is no meaning, for there is no con- 
sideration of the relative success or failure of the sys- 
tem as reached by the figures shown. For example, if 
the enrollment is 489, what should it be; how many 
children rightfully within the sphere of influence of this 
church are not enrolled; and who are they, and where 

84 



IF THE CHURCH SHOULD ADOPT A PROGRAM 

do they live, and why are they not here? If the attend- 
ance is 250 out of 489, what should it be; what is a fair 
average attendance based on enrollment; what is it for 
these same children in their public schools; why is it 
not larger here? If only 10 teachers out of 22 are pres- 
ent, where are the rest? Who are they? Is this a habit 
with the absentee group? Why are they not here 
to-day? If the collection is $2.63 for 250 people, is this 
about what it should be? If not, why is it not more? 

But even when all these questions are answered in 
such a way as to make the statistics intelligible — as 
they seldom are — this is still only the beginning; for 
these things that the average school sets so much store 
by are but the preliminaries. The real question is, What 
are the educational results of our school? Thorndike 
tells us that education consists of "effecting desired 
changes in the lives of the pupils. " What changes are 
the various classes effecting in the minds of their pupils? 
How efficient is the teaching? Is there any real study 
on the lessons? How much real spiritual development 
is going on? How much different in thought, life, ideals, 
character, loyalty to God and the church are the pupils 
for their contact with the Sunday school? It is evident, 
of course, that these questions do not admit of objective 
measurement and statistical statement in the same way 
that the other set of facts do. But they are not on 
that account the less important. 

Nor are we wholly devoid of practical measure for 
these things. Suppose that each superintendent, each 
teacher, should take these three measures for the suc- 
cess of his work: 

1. What usable religious knowledge are my pupils 
getting — about God, the Bible, the way of life set 
forth by Jesus? 

85 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

2. What religious attitudes are they developing — in- 
terests, ideals, standards, loyalties toward the school, 
the church, the Bible, life itself? 

3. What practical applications are they making of the 
truths taught and lessons learned to their daily living 
in the home, the school, the community, the world at 
large, etc.? 

Would not a sober study of actual results on some 
such simple basis as this tend to disturb the com- 
placency of many schools that now seem to be run- 
ning so smoothly but which are measuring their success 
in terms of the simpler, more easily secured and more 
objective results? 

Vitally related to this last problem, the real educa- 
tional test of the church school, is the standard of the 
pupil's mastery of the curriculum, the extent to which 
he knows, understands, and applies the lessons he is 
taught. Religion involves a body of materials, chiefly 
but not wholly from the Bible, to be studied, remem- 
bered, repeated, discussed, applied, carried out into 
activity. Our standards on these points at present are 
lamentably low. Probably not one child in a hundred 
could pass such an examination on his Sunday-school 
material as he is required to pass month by month in 
his public-school studies in order to secure promotion. 
Yet the child must learn his religion and develop it in 
accordance with the same laws that govern his develop- 
ment in public school education. 

The remedy at this point will necessitate better 
teaching. It will require better conditions under which 
teaching may go on, better classroom facilities, better 
equipment, more time available. It will also require 
somewhat radical revision of the curriculum which is 
offered the child. 

86 



IF THE CHURCH SHOULD ADOPT A PROGRAM 

A full discussion of the content and plan of the curric- 
ulum of religious education would exceed the limits of 
this discussion. One important feature, however, may- 
be mentioned — that of the mechanical form in which 
curriculum materials for the church schools are issued. 
Partly as a matter of tradition and partly as a matter 
of supposed economy the materials are quite commonly 
issued in pamphlet or leaflet form for both teachers 
and pupils. 

This is a serious educational error. The value of 
truth is influenced by the form in which it is printed 
and bound. Religious materials coming to the pupil in 
the form of temporary unbound leaflets, often inferior 
in paper, illustrations, type, and general impression to 
the advertising pamphlets that flood our mails and 
immediately find their way to our wastebaskets, cannot 
have the effect that these same lessons would have in 
the form of attractive textbooks. 

Nor is there any incentive to keep this leaflet ma- 
terial as a permanent part of a growing personal li- 
brary, so we seldom find any evidence in the home of 
the child's church-school curriculum. In fact, most of 
what is given out to children is mislaid, lost, or de- 
stroyed without ever having been used. Religious 
material should not suffer in comparison with public- 
school texts in the matter of attractiveness of form. 

Nor is it at all certain that the temporary form of 
publication is cheaper in the end; in fact, it is beyond 
question a highly expensive and uneconomical method 
of issuing lesson materials. It will be granted, of course, 
that for younger children various leaflets, pictures, etc., 
are essential. For those old enough to read, however, a 
textbook system would be more economical based on 
the amount of use to be had from any single unit of 

&7 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

printed materials. The church should own its textbooks 
and loan them out as the public-school district does to 
its pupils. If the pupil desires to buy the book and 
have it for his own, he may do so in either case. If he 
loses a book or injures it, he is expected to pay for it in 
one case as in the other. In this way successive classes 
can use the same texts for several years, thus requiring 
in the end much less of actual printing and distributing 
of material than under the present system. 



88 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE NEW PROGRAM 

It is evident even to the casual observer that a new 
type of educational program is developing among the 
Protestant Churches of this country. Every denomina- 
tion is without exception recently seeking to strengthen 
its educational organization and perfect its educational 
agencies. Almost every individual church has felt the 
urge of this movement and is responding in accordance 
with whatever of vision and leadership it may possess. 

The new program of religious education will not only 
call for new methods but for a certain amount of new 
organization as well. ' It is, of course, good economy and 
also gdbd policy to use existent organizations in so far as 
they will serve the purpose. Wherever a new organiza- 
tion is needed, however, the church should not hesitate 
to effect such change as may be required. Nothing should 
be retained merely because it is old, nothing should be 
accepted just because it is new. The test of practical 
working efficiency should govern. 

MAKING THE SUNDAY SCHOOL A CHILDREN'S CHURCH 

Historically, the Sunday school is at the center of 
religious education in the church and will probably re- 
main so for the near future at least without fundamental 
reconstruction. However, the present type of Sunday 
school could greatly add to its efficiency by certain 
changes in its organization, policy, and standards. 

The Junior Church plan will, however, not solve the 
whole problem — at least as the problem now exists. For 
the curve of attendance in the Sunday school drops 

89 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

sharply in the teen age. Especially the boys of the high 
school period do not go in large numbers to the church 
school, nor do the girls go as well as in the earlier grades. 
This is a fatal weakness, for probably at no time does the 
individual more need the stimulus and guidance of re- 
ligious instruction than during the time of the difficult 
transition from childhood and youth to manhood and 
womanhood. Now is the time when ideals are taking 
definite and practical form. Plans are shaping for life- 
work. New temptations thrust themselves forward. Held 
to the church and its influences now, the life is reasonably 
safe; separated at this juncture from the church, there is 
danger of growing indifference and final disregard. 

In every way possible, therefore, the church should 
strengthen this section of its school. The curriculum now 
offered for the high-school age needs radical and effective 
revision. Inspiring teachers who know and love the 
adolescent and who are highly skilled in materials and 
method should be provided. Good classrooms should be 
made available, teaching equipment supplied, and every- 
thing else done which wisdom and trained leadership can 
suggest to hold the young people in contact with the 
Sunday school and the church. For at this age they are 
no longer sent. They come or stay away. And they will 
come only if their interest and their sense of values are 
satisfied with the results. 

Out of the Sunday school should be made the children's 
church. The adult church can never successfully serve as 
a church for the children just because they are children 
with the requirements of children instead of adults. The 
church that serves the children must be primarily a 
teaching church just as the church that serves the adults 
is primarily a preaching church. 

The present-day Sunday school is hardly adequate as 

90 



THE NEW PROGRAM 

a children's church, though it could easily be made so. 
To make the Sunday school into a true church for the 
children the program could be organized on somewhat 
the following basis with whatever modifications might be 
necessary to adapt it to varying conditions : 

The Junior Church (that is, the modified Sunday 
school) should consist of all children from the Beginners 
up to the age of thirteen or fourteen. It should meet 
before the Senior Church services, say at nine o'clock and 
close at ten-fifteen or ten-thirty. The program should be 
a varied one, with frequent changes of activity suited to 
the various ages. 

The first half hour should be devoted to the prepara- 
tion of lessons — supervised study, directed activities or 
the carrying out of other assigned work. It is recognized 
by every Sunday-school worker at present that it is 
practically impossible to secure any real study and prep- 
aration of the lesson materials. Supervised study and 
directed activities are provided for in the best public 
schools of the day and they are doubly needed in religious 
education. 

The second period should be for general congregational 
assembly and worship. For this purpose the best part of 
the church should be used, the auditorium w^th its organ, 
architecture, and all other environmental influences capa- 
ble of making religious impressions. During this period 
the minister will preach to the children a sermon of from 
eight to ten minutes — a sermon that has had as much 
thought and care in its preparation as the one intended 
for adults. The program will include much singing of 
children's hymns led by one who knows how to teach 
children to sing. The children will participate in short 
ritual responses and in congregational prayers. Every 
part of the exercises will be pleasant and enjoyable and 

9i 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

devotional in the best sense. Adults may come to the 
service, but they must sit at the rear or in the galleries, 
leaving the body of the church and its best seats for the 
children. The teachers will, of course, be distributed 
among the children's congregation by classes. 

During the third period the children will again meet 
by classes for recitation of the lessons prepared during the 
first period, for drills, dramatizations, discussion, expres- 
sional assignments and reports, for study assignments and 
whatever else is suitable to age and subject matter. 

It is, of course, not essential to the plan that the three 
periods shall follow in just the order here suggested. But 
it is necessary that the three lines of activity shall be 
carried out; namely, study, worship, instruction. 

The Junior Church should provide for definite recogni- 
tion of membership, for promotion from class to class and 
finally for graduation into the Senior Church and church 
school. The annual graduation exercises should be 
celebrated fittingly. Children who have not prior to this 
time become members of the general church would then 
be received into membership. For those already mem- 
bers an impressive recognition service would be provided. 
By this method of close bridging over a great leakage 
from the church could be cured. 

^Some may object that the plan here proposed will break 
up the family and not bring the whole family group to- 
gether at any church service. Two answers may be given 
to this problem: First, it is the rare exception rather than 
the rule now to find the entire family together at the 
church service, nor is the tendency growing in that 
direction. Second, except as a matter of sentiment it is 
not at all certain that the best religious results can be 
obtained by having the family all together at any one 
service of the church, since when this occurs one part of 

92 



THE NEW PROGRAM 

the family (practically always the children) are left un- 
provided for in the program of services. 

Others may object that the plan offered is nothing, 
after all, but the present Sunday school somewhat 
modified. Precisely. The plan differs from the Sunday 
school only in the expansion and richness of its program 
and functions. It provides for actual study and prepara- 
tion under direction; it seeks to introduce a serious, care- 
fully planned, impressive program of worship; it brings 
the minister in contact as preacher with the children of 
the church; it recognizes and brings children to recognize 
a church for the children as well as a church for the 
adults; it provides for formal taking over of children from 
the junior into the senior, or general, church. 

Wholly aside from questions of organization such as 
we have been discussing the Sunday school should seek 
to standardize its work on an educational basis. The 
educational survey has become an important instrument 
for improving public-school systems. For use in making 
such surveys there have been developed various scales, 
tests, and schedules by means of which to measure the 
teaching, curriculum, organization, administration, 
equipment, etc. A beginning in this direction has been 
made in the field of religious education, but much needs 
to be done. 

It is possible, for example, for a public school system to 
say after such a survey: Our teaching force, based on 
standards obtaining in American schools, ranks ninety 
per cent in efficiency; our results in arithmetic one hun- 
dred and ten per cent; our language and reading eighty- 
five per cent; our buildings and equipment seventy per 
cent; our care of health and teaching of hygiene seventy- 
five per cent. Similarly, it would be a great help if each 
Sunday school could be able to rate itself on various 

93 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

aspects of its work by use of accepted standards applied 
to church schools. It might cure many schools of an un- 
warranted complacency. 

THE VACATION CHURCH DAY SCHOOL 

A new movement has grown up within the last decade 
for using a part of the child's summer vacation time for 
religious instruction. The public school claims only 
about three-fourths of the child's year for general educa- 
tion. While it is true that the child should have some 
free time for vacation, it is not necessary nor desirable 
that there should be three months each year of idleness. 
Indeed, after the first two or three weeks of the long 
summer vacation most children do not know quite what 
to do with themselves and gladly welcome an interesting 
program, a part of which may be instructional. 

The movement for the church vacation school has 
developed so rapidly that literally hundreds of churches 
and communities have now come to use from four to six 
weeks of the summer for special schools organized for the 
children. The program is usually five days each week 
covering from two to three hours in the forenoon. 

As in the case of all new movements there has been 
evidence of some lack of definiteness of aim and of method 
in connection with many of the church vacation schools. 
Some have attempted to do little except to bring the 
children in from the streets and amuse them for an hour 
or two in a good environment. Others of the schools have 
undertaken to base their program largely upon craft 
work of various sorts. Still others have worked out a bet- 
ter balanced program and use a reasonable portion of the 
time for serious and definite religious instruction while at 
the same time remembering to provide sufficient recrea- 
tion and fun to attract this side of the child's nature. 

94 



THE NEW PROGRAM 

Certain general principles, which grow out of the needs 
of the child himself, are clear with reference to the pro- 
gram of the vacation school. First, this is a vacation 
school and must therefore be somewhat different from 
the regular school of the work-time year. Second, the 
fourfold nature of the child should be ministered to: 
(i) the physical, in its health, cleanliness, purity, and 
general well-being; (2) the mental, in its requirement for 
interesting fact, discovery, thought, learning; (3) the 
social, with its comradeship, service, recreation, fun; (4) 
the spiritual, with its growth in religious knowledge and 
understanding, its training in worship, its carrying in- 
struction over into character through expressional activ- 
ities and practical projects of helpfulness and cooperation. 
All four of these needs should be represented in the cur- 
riculum of the vacation church school. 

In general, it may be said that for the church, ham- 
pered as it is for adequate time in which to teach the 
child religion, this vacation time which commonly goes 
to waste is too precious to overlook or neglect. An im- 
portant part of the modern plan of religious education 
will therefore be to organize and conduct an effective 
church vacation school, the length of which should 
probably be from five to six weeks. This may be done 
by individual churches but probably best by federated or 
community effort where conditions will permit. 

THE WEEK-DAY CHURCH SCHOOL 

One of the most recent and promising movements in 
religious education is that of the week-day church school. 

Throughout all its history it has been the policy of the 
Catholic Church to combine religious instruction with 
general education. In order to accomplish this purpose, 
as already indicated, Catholics in this country have 

95 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

quite generally desired to draw their children out from 
the public schools and send them to parochial schools 
run by the church. In these schools religion has a regular 
part on each day's program as much as arithmetic or 
geography. As was said earlier in the discussion, this 
thorough instruction in religion from childhood up is no 
doubt the chief factor in the ability of the Catholic 
Church to maintain itself. 

The Jewish people in the United States have also 
carried on a more-or-less effective program of religious 
instruction for their children. This has differed from the 
policy of the Catholics, however, in that they have not 
taken their children out of the public schools in order to 
give them religious instruction on week days. Their 
usual method has been to claim the time of the child for 
one class period each day of the week for religious in- 
struction in addition to his regular public school work. 
In this way the Jews have, while remaining loyal sup- 
porters to the public schools, at the same time made sure 
that their children were not lacking in the fundamental 
knowledge and training of their religion. 

With the Protestant Church the problem has been 
somewhat different than in either of the two cases cited. 
In the earlier history of this country the curriculum of 
general education was distinctly religious. The old New 
England Primer used for more than one hundred and 
fifty years as the child's sole introduction to reading and 
literature consisted almost wholly of distinctly religious 
material. The Bible was also regularly read and studied 
in the schools, as it was in the homes. Other religious 
books also formed a part of the school curriculum. 

With the growth of the principle of the separation of 
church and state, however, the curriculum of public 
education was naturally secularized and religion dropped 

9 6 



THE NEW PROGRAM 

out of the public-school course. Along with this change 
the church home seemed to lose much of its interest in 
instructing the child in religion. The result has been 
that the Protestant child has for the most part little or 
no religious instruction except that received in the Sun- 
day school and in occasional attendance at the general 
church sessions. This is to say that religion has been 
almost wholly lost out of his education and hence out 
of his general life equipment. 

Two principles will serve to determine the amount of 
time which any subject should have in the child's gen- 
eral scheme of education: (i) the importance of that 
subject in the life of the individual and in the welfare of 
society; (2) the scope, breadth, or amount of material in the 
subject necessary to be covered in order to master it and 
secure its advantages. 

Now, no one who believes at all in religion will be 
likely to say that it is of less importance in the life of an 
individual or society than any one of the public school 
subjects. Yet the child in the average public school of 
the United States will during most of the eight grades of 
the elementary school have from fifty to sixty hours a 
year upon the subject of arithmatics. At the same time 
this child, even if he attends Sunday school, is quite cer- 
tain not to have more than six to ten hours of religious 
instruction during a year, and this under very unfavor- 
able conditions. The result is that our children are not 
educated in religion as they are in the subjects of their 
public-school course. 

Upon such principles and reasoning the church is re- 
cently coming to ask for a division of public school time 
in order that the child may have a reasonable proportion 
of week-day time for instruction in religion. The time 
allowed on Sunday does not afford sufficient opportunity 

97 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

to give the basic instruction and training in religion 
which the child needs. The addition -of, say, two class 
periods a week, to the church school time, would afford 
a reasonable division of the child's entire educational 
time and still not cripple the program of general edu- 
cation. 

Besides the securing of more time by the introduction 
of week-day classes in religion this system affords the 
advantage of giving religious instruction on somewhat 
the same basis as that which obtains for general educa- 
tion. The child in the week-day class in religion is more 
likely to employ there the same standards of study, 
mastery, and recitation that obtain in the public school 
than he is in his Sunday-school work. Furthermore, the 
very fact of carrying religion over into the week-day life 
tends to develop in the child the fundamental under- 
standing that religion is not a matter for Sundays only 
but that it belongs in all relations and activities of living 
all the days of the week. 

Some have feared that the extending of instruction in 
religion over into week-day time will again introduce 
religion into the public schools, which is, of course, not 
the case. The principle of separation of church and state 
is so thoroughly established in this country that it is no 
longer open to discussion. Those who are advocating 
week-day instruction in religion are not advising that 
this instruction be given in public schools, or by public- 
school teachers, or under the supervision of public-school 
authorities. These three fundamental tests define be- 
yond question the responsibility of the church for its 
week-day schools: 

(i) Week-day religious instruction is supported by 
church funds and not by public funds. 

(2) The curriculum taught in the week-day church 

98 



\ 



THE NEW PROGRAM 

school is selected not by public school authority but by 
church authority. 

(3) The teachers and their requirements are deter- 
mined, not by public school, but by church authority. 

Once these three principles are definitely settled, there 
can be no question of combining religious instruction 
with public-school instruction or of stirring up the old 
controversy of the relations of church and state. The 
public schools do not desire to be commissioned with 
responsibility for teaching religion nor do the churches 
desire them to be delegated with this responsibility. 

While week-day religious instruction presents many 
difficult problems, it is doubtful whether the church can 
do its duty in educating the child in religion without 
claiming some portion of his week-day time. Important 
experiments are now under way in week-day church 
schools, and many new enterprises are organizing. To- 
ward the solution of this question the church should 
devote its best energies. 

THE TEACHER TRAINING SCHOOL 

No system of church schools is complete that does not 
definitely provide for the training of teachers of religion. 
It is an inspiring thought that we have in the United 
States nearly two million Sunday-school teachers and 
officers freely serving the educational program of the 
church without monetary compensation. 

Yet in the very fact of unpaid service there is danger. 
The state is able, because it pays the salaries of the 
public-school teachers, to set certain standards for their 
education and make certain requirements for continued 
growth and professional advancement after they begin 
service. In the volunteer system of church-school teach- 
ing there can, of course, be no such thing as examinations 

99 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

and certificates and required study. It is doubtful 
whether the great army of church school teachers could 
pass a very high examination on the subject matter they 
are supposed to teach. The sense of duty, devotion and 
opportunity must be appealed to in each teacher to 
insure as full a preparation and growth as may be. 

In every Sunday school of fair size there should be one 
normal class consisting of the most promising young 
people of both sexes who are willing to prepare for teach- 
ing positions as they offer. 

For teachers and officers already in service the church 
and the community training school have been devised. 
Many churches now have special evening classes for 
teachers meeting once each week for from twelve to 
twenty-four weeks a year. Supplementing these and 
usually altogether stronger and more efficient are the 
community training schools consisting of workers from 
all the various denominations organized in special classes 
under highly trained instructors. 

Both types of teacher-training schools are on the 
increase, but as yet a pitifully small proportion of our 
Sunday-school teachers have had or are taking any 
training adequately to prepare them for their great work. 
The church must train its teachers. It is as impossible 
to teach religion as it is arithmetic without knowing the 
materials or having mastered the technique of instruc- 
tion. An irreligious teacher of science is no more of an 
anomaly than an unscientific teacher of religion. 

THE HOME 

Let us not conclude, however, that the new program 
of religious education can be carried out by the organiza- 
tions of the church alone no matter how well the work 
may be done. The home must do its share. 

ioo 



THE NEW PROGRAM 

Time was when the home was required to teach the 
child the rudiments of reading and number before he 
could be admitted to the public school. The records of 
the old New England town meetings contain many 
entries to the effect that "Goodman So-and-So is re- 
quired to take his children out of the school until they 
have been properly prepared for admission/' — that is, 
until the home had taught the beginnings of the " three 
R's." So also the old-time home taught the child in a 
very practical and concrete way what we now call 
manual training and domestic science — taught these 
things in the everyday routine of household duties in 
which every member from the youngest to the oldest had 
a responsible part. Now the home teaches practically 
none of these things. The school has for the most part 
taken them all over, and the home is relieved of responsi- 
bility. 

In similar way the earlier home, the church home, 
taught its children religion. The family worship, the 
grace at meals, the Sunday readings of the Bible, the 
memorizing of verses, the learning of the catechism — 
these and other forms of religious instruction were a 
regular part of the family program, an accepted part of 
its responsibilities. But times have changed, and even 
the church family — the average family — seems to have 
handed instruction in religion over to the church as it has 
handed instruction in general education over to the school. 

This will not work. No program of religion will work 
which leaves the home out. There is no possibility of 
giving all responsibility for religious instruction and im- 
pression over to the church as arithmetic may be given 
to the school. 

In the first place it will not work because the religious 
impressions of the child should be begun earlier than the 

IOI 



NEW PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

church can get him. Back of the time reached by the 
later memory the child should be under the influence of 
the mother's (and at the right time his own) bedtime 
prayer; of the quiet-hour talk and story; of the lullaby; 
of the grace said at meals; and of a home thoroughly 
permeated by a reverent religious atmosphere. For in 
these earliest years the most lasting impressions are made 
and the surest foundations laid. As the child comes to 
the age of understanding, the home can through the 
religious story, through simple talks and explanations by 
mother and father about God and about Jesus, through 
songs and hymns, and through direct instruction do more 
for the spiritual unfoldment of the child's nature than 
can possibly be done by the church. 

Furthermore, after the church begins its training of 
the child there must be a laboratory for working out, 
making real, and putting into practice the teachings of 
the church school. The most natural and the best labora- 
tory is the home. Here the lessons can be exemplified in 
the love and care and kindness of the members of the 
family. Here the instruction in obedience, in helpfulness, 
in truthfulness, and honor can find application and rein- 
forcement — providing the home is in sympathetic con- 
tact with the church school and doing its share in carrying 
out the joint program of the child's religious training. 

To bring the home to realize its share of responsibility 
for the child's education in religion and to help the home 
prepare to meet this responsibility is one of the first 
responsibilities of the church in its new program. Nor 
will it be sufficient for the preacher now and then to 
preach a sermon on the responsibility of the home, not 
even if he exhorts fathers and mothers warmly on the 
subject. He may do these things, but they are easily 
done — and not very effective. 

102 



THE NEW PROGRAM 

The church should have training classes for parents 
just as for teachers. In these classes should be taught 
something of the religion of childhood, the way to begin 
to make religious impressions on the child, how to teach 
to pray, first ideas to give about God, how to lead to 
right observance of the Sabbath — such practical ques- 
tions should be discussed by a leader who knows by 
experience and training how to meet these and similar 
problems and how to help parents meet them. 

But the responsibility of the church does not end here. 
The home needs created for it and put into its hands a 
new literature on child religion. This literature must be 
scientifically based but wholly untechnical in form. It 
must not only discuss and illustrate methods but must 
supply an abundance of concrete materials in the way of 
Bible and other religious stories, songs, prayers, pictures, 
and whatever else can fruitfully be used in training the 
child. 

It will then be the problem and the privilege of each 
local church, through every agency that can be brought 
to bear on the problem, to interest, instruct, train, in- 
spire parents to use these materials in bringing the home 
effectively to do its part toward the religious develop- 
ment of its children. 



103 



A SELECTED LIST OF BOOKS, PAMPHLETS, AND 

ARTICLES BEARING ON THE PROBLEMS 

SET FORTH IN THIS BOOK: 

Coe, G. A., A Social Theory of Religious Education. 
Stout, J. E., Organization and Administration of Re- 
ligious Education. 

Week-day Religious Instruction. 
Betts, G. H., How to Teach Religion. 

The Curriculum of Religious Education. 
Cope, H. F., The School in the Modern Church. 

The Week-Day Church School. 

Athearn, W. S., Religious Education and American 
Democracy. 

Richardson, N. E., Religious Education as a Vocation. 

(Editor) American Home Series. 
Stafford, Hazel S., The Church Vacation School. 
McKibben, F. M., The Community Training School. 
Betts, A. F., The Mother-Teacher of Religion. 
Crawford, L. W., Vocations Within the Church. 

(The above books can be secured through your regular 
bookseller.) 



McGiffert, A. C, "A Teaching Church," Religious Edu- 
cation, February, 192 1. 

Coe, G. A., "Religious Education Finding Itself," School 
and Society, January 20, 1915. 
104 



A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Conrad, H. M., "The Lake Avenue (Rochester, New 
York) Plan of Religious Education/' Religious 
Education, December, 1920. 

Cowles, Mary K., "The Van Wert Plan of Week-Day 
Religious Instruction," Religious Education, Febru- 
ary, 1920. 

Seaman, W. G., "Gary's Week-Day Community School 
for Religious Education," Religious Education, 
October, 1918. 

Squires, W. A., "The Week-Day Church School," 
Presbyterian Board of Publications, 1921. 

Betts, G. H., "What Can Religious Education Do for 
the Church," Religious Education, June, 1920. 



105 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION POSTERS 

The following Posters and others on Religious Education 

can be obtained in size suitable for wall use 

from the publishers of this volume. 

Copyright, 192 1, by Arthur F. Stevens. 



107 



' 



What Can Religious Education 
Do For the Church? 



T^AKE the Church back to the method 
•^ used by Jesus and by the early Chris- 
tian Church. 

Double the Church's membership within 
the next decade. 

Through conservation reduce the need for 
reclamation and multiply a hundred fold 
the effective outcome of funds and effort 
devoted to church work. 

Vitalize and give dynamic force to the 
spiritual life of the Church by building 
religion firmly into the every-day char- 
acter and experience of its people. 

Provide for the Church an intelligent and 
loyal membership instructed in the Bible 
and trained in Christian living. 



MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR THE CHURCH TO TAKE 

THE OFFENSIVE FOR THE SPIRITUAL 

REGENERATION OF THE WORLD 



What Shall the Church 
Do to Be Saved? 



O 



BEY the great spiritual and biological 
law that one who would save his life 
must be ready to lose it in service. 



Build its program around childhood. 
Change the center of emphasis from the 
adult to youth, claiming life at its source 
rather than reclaiming it at its end. 

Awaken to the fact already discovered by 
the state — that education is the chief in- 
strument by which it can fulfill its task 
and achieve its destiny. Build into the 
structure of young life the spiritual values 
necessary for its fulfillment. 

Turn into its own channels the great spirit- 
ual stream of youthful energy and enthu- 
siasm now going to waste in barren 
places for lack of religious education of 
childhood. 



SAVE CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH THROUGH 
RELIGIOUS NURTURE AND EDUCATION 



Religious Education The Birth- 
Right of the Chad 

The best and most natural way for the child 
to enter into his spiritual heritage is to 
grow into it gradually from the beginning. 

Only those ideals which have been built into 
the structure of character from childhood 
later become a dynamic and dependable 
factor in the life. 

New religious concepts offered a mature 
and hardened life are like fresh shoots 
grafted on old trees. 

Spiritual ideals, loyalties, devotions and the 
consciousness of God in the life cannot 
come in a day. They are the products 
of wise, persistent training in religion 
through the plastic years. 

No reclaimed life can ever be what would 
have been possible without the necessity 
for reclamation. It is always too late to 
be what we might have been. 

Religion can and must be taught. In his 
religious development the child uses the 
same powers of mind and heart that are 
employed in other avenues of experience. 

The new program of religious education 
does not substitute mere training for the 
Divine influence working on the life. It 
offers a way to prevent the soul of the 
child from ever breaking connections 
with the Divine. 



Week-Day Religious Education 



THE NEED: 

EVERY American child has an inalienable right 
to a knowledge of the Bible and to training in 
the Christian religion. 

The Public School can not teach religion; the Home 
increasingly does not. 

The Sunday School has done a remarkable work, 
but with its necessary limitations it can never fully 
meet the need. 

We are in danger of becoming a nation of religious 

illiterates : 

Children 6-12 years in U. S., 20,500,000 

Children 6-12 years in Sunday School, 5,350,000 

Two thirds of all American children receive no sig- 
nificant religious instruction. 

Religion is as important and as much a part of life 
equipment as geography or arithmetic. Religion 
can be taught; it should have its share in any pro- 
gram of education. 

Week-day religious education will help the Church 
meet this obligation. It is helping meet it now 
for thousands of children in many American com- 
munities. 



LET THE CHURCH PUT THE CHILD AT THE 
CENTER OF ITS PROGRAM 



Week-Day Religious Education 



THE PLAN: 

'IMUbl churches of each community should form a 

*■ federation for the promotion of week-day reli- 
gious instruction as a joint enterprise. Where this is 
impossible a single denomination should conduct the 
school. 

The Week-Day Church School year should run 
parallel with public school year. 

About two class periods a week should be given to 
religious instruction. 

Classes are held in churches, or in public school or 
other suitable buildings as the community desires. 

Time from school program is granted (on request of 
parent) for work in religion by public school authori- 
ties, or classes are held before or after school or on 
Saturdays. 

Religious instruction is not to be a part of the public 
school system; teachers are selected, funds provided 
and curriculum determined by the churches. 

Each church will maintain and strengthen its own 
Sunday School, which will be supplemented by the 
joint week-day instruction. 

WORK IN THE CHURCH SCHOOL BROUGHT TO AS 
HIGH A STANDARD AS IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 



Week-Day Religious Education 

THE CURRICULUM: 

GRADED Volumes for every age from Beginners on through 
the High School and into the College. 

A series of text books as carefully planned, as well adapted, 
printed, illustrated and bound as the texts used in the public 
schools. 

Every lesson embodies the scientific principles of modern 
education, but without sacrificing religious warmth or spiritual 
dynamic. 

On the one hand the texts supplement the work of the Sunday 
School; on the other they correlate in grading and content with 
the work of the public schools. 

The materials are carefully tested and proved in actual class 
room use under skilled teaching and supervision. 

The Bible supplies the core of subject matter, but nature, 
literature, and life are freely drawn upon. 

Large place is given to suitable forms of expression work 
planned to make the lessons carry over into conduct, habits 
and character. 

Both in their content and their pedagogical plan the texts are 
such as will make the teaching of religion a joy and its study 
a delight. 

The volumes are interdenominational in the sense that they 
supply the great f undamentals of religious truth and basic virtues 
whose need and application are common to all denominations 
without reference to church or creed. 

WHAT WE WOULD HAVE IN THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH 
WE MUST FIRST PUT IN ITS SCHOOLS 



The Church Vacation 
Day School 



TXTHY waste one fourth of the child's precious educa- 

▼V tion time? 
The program of the Public School leaves 20,000,000 chil- 
dren idle for three months each summer. 

Here is the Church's great opportunity. Through the 
Vacation Day School the Church can recruit its own ranks 
and Christianize the nation. 

The long summer vacation is not only a period of wasted 
opportunity and retrogression but of grave moral danger 
to thousands of children. Save the danger by means of 
the Church Vacation School. 

Let the Church bring together in the Vacation Day School 
the three anomalous factors: idle children, idle church 
buildings, and devoted but idle teachers. 

Parents approve Vacation Schools, the children are en- 
thusiastic over them, ministers count them one of the best 
agencies for the religious training of the young. 

More than two thousand churches and communities have 
found in the long summer months an opportunity for 
supplementing the child's religious instruction and making 
fruitful use of his leisure time. 

The busiest and most fruitful months should be the sum- 
mer months for most churches. When the Public School 
closes its doors let the doors of the Church be open to 
every child. 



MORE TIME IS NEEDED FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 

THAT TIME IS AVAILABLE IN THE SUMMER 

VACATION. WILL THE CHURCH USE IT? 



The Church Vacation 
School Should 



— minister to the whole child: physical, 
mental, social and moral: hence, 

— provide instruction in the Bible. 

— teach religion through nature, literature 
and life. 

— make familiar the devotional music and 
art of the Church. 

— broaden the social nature and quicken 
and enrich the sympathies by teaching 
the great missionary adventures of the 
Church. 

— give lessons in Christian citizenship. 

— build for physical well being, right 
habits, health and happiness. 

— supply abundant recreation and give 
training in suitable games and play. 

—afford opportunity for expression 
through the hand, social conduct and 
in such other ways as will lead to 
useful habits. 



HELP THE CHURCH FULFILL ITS 
OBLIGATION TO CHILDHOOD y 



The Community Training School 

Helps to Reunite Religion and Education 



Solves the problem of supply teachers 

Strengthens the morale of the teaching 
corps 

Supplements the teacher-training pro- 
grams of the local churches 

Provides specialized courses of training 

Creates reverence for the Word of God, 
for the child, and for the Church 
School 

Exalts the teaching ministry of the church 

Provides teachers with objectives, mo- 
tives, skill 

Answers the questions— who shall teach, 
how to teach, and what to teach 



"STUDY TO SHOW THYSELF APPROVED OF GOD, 
A WORKMAN THAT NEEDETH NOT TO BE 
ASHAMED, RIGHTLY DIVIDING 
THE WORD OF TRUTH" 

U TIMOTHY, 2:15 



The Community Training School 



A poor teacher can spoil a good lesson 

Are the pupils being taught or are they be- 
ing merely sprayed with ideas? 

Does the teacher of religion need less train- 
ing than the teacher of arithmetic? 

In teaching religion, religious motives are 
not a substitute for technical insight. 
Both are needed. 

It is not so much— do you know how to 
teach the lesson? as, do you know how to 
teach the boy? 

No person has a moral right to undertake 
to teach if ignorant of the subject matter 
or unappreciative of its true worth. 

Which is worse— an irreligious teacher of 
science or an unscientific teacher of 
religion? 

The Community Training School gets rid 
of both. 



A NIGHT SCHOOL FOR THE TRAINING OF PRESENT 
AND PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS, PARENTS, LEADERS. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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